Does corruption make us less likely to trust political institutions? Comparative investigations of this question have shifted from a resounding “yes” to more uncertain prognoses in the last decade. I engage with theories in political economy to help explain high-trust, high-corruption patterns in the former Soviet states, with minor comparison to Latin America and East Asia. Specifically, I use quantitative methods to investigate whether citizens trade off petty corruption concerns in good economic times, and whether they are equally punitive of corruption across the regime spectrum. Finally, I investigate whether economic growth is a boon or burden for incumbent support across Russian subnational regions. To bolster my empirical approach, I critique existing conceptions of political trust and test for the measurement equivalence of political trust across heterogeneous populations. In doing so, I offer new theoretical insight into how citizens relate to their political institutions in the presence of public institutional dysfunction, and I offer new methodological insight into how we can better measure political trust in cross-regime settings.
| Date of Award | 2018 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | |
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| Supervisor | David Skarbek (Supervisor) & Adrian Blau (Supervisor) |
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Political Trust, Corruption and Economic Development in the Former Soviet Space
Schneider, I. M. (Author). 2018
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy