Authoritarianism, Social Dominance and Trust in Public Institutions
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Date
2011
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Abstract
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Trust in public institutions plays a key role in democratic societies. To the extent to whichindividuals rely on institutions such as the government and the parliament, they would be morewilling to participate and get involved in public life; therefore, trust in institutions impacts inthe legitimacy and stability of democratic regimes. To date there are several approaches to thisarea that usually compare general trust levels by using country surveys, nevertheless theemphasis so far is mostly descriptive and based on cross sectional data. The present paperattempts to overcome some of these limitations by proposing an explanatory model of trust inpublic institutions to be estimated in a longitudinal framework. The central hypothesis guidingthe analysis is that high levels of social dominance (SDO) and authoritarianism (RWA) areimportant predictors of trust in three types of public institutions: the government, politicalparties and armed forces. The analyses are based on a panel survey (n=1,800) of universitystudents from the P. Universidad Católica de Chile. Results from structural equation modelssupport the hypotheses, even though there are relevant differences between SDO and RWA interms of predictive power according to the type of institution in which individuals trust.