Trust, Regulation and Redistribution

Abstract

For many social scientists government intervention is linked to low levels of social trust and corruption, while, on the contrary, for others government intervention is associated with high trust and low corruption. We aim to reconcile these contrasting findings by distinguishing the opposing effects of trust over two alternative types of government intervention: regulation and redistribution. We argue that low-trust individuals demand more governmental regulation (H1) but less government redistribution (H2). And the effects of trust over policy preferences are conditional on the quality of institutions. The higher the level of quality of government in a particular region, the more hightrusting individuals will like government redistribution and will dislike government regulation that restricts the operations of free markets (H3). We test these hypotheses with data from the latest round of the European Quality of Government Index survey, which covers 77,000 individuals from 185 regions of 21 EU Member States.