The personal characteristics that affect trust in government: a global analysis across regions

Abstract

This paper examines the personal characteristics that determine the extent of Trust in Government, using over 400,000 observations from 97 countries provided by surveys held during the years 1990-2023. These survey data reveal how persons’ individual characteristics influence such trust. Most of these relationships are intuitive, for example that people who are satisfied, secured, immigrants, elderly and female, tend to trust government more. On the other hand, those in employment and living in cities tend to have lower trust, for reasons that we explain. Perhaps our main finding, and the key result of the paper, is that those who obtain their news primarily from traditional sources, i.e. newspapers and television, tend to trust government more, while those who have their main source of information from social media trust government less. We also study whether the geographical location of the respondent influences their Trust in Government. What we find is that the effect of these personal characteristics is remarkably common, wherever the respondent is located, unlike the response to other external economic and geopolitical factors which tend often to vary between one region and another.