Anyone with the slightest amount of official power, like a government officer, has the ability to prevent things going forward on his part. In this kind of society, most people are poor and it would be considered stupid to not demand a small (or large) bribe from the citizen in order to unlock the process. Everyone does it, more with outsiders and to a lesser extent with one's circle of acquaintances (because the social fabric between known parties is the other way to unlock things). Corruption surely is one thing that really trickles down from the top.
So, things like like obediently waiting in the queue for your turn or complaining about the officer won't help unlike in high-trust societies. If you try that in a low-trust society there will be additional documents, stamps, acknowledges, or signatures you need, and keep needing, in order to complete your request until you get the drift and bring a little something. Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait.
In Western democracies this sounds unimaginable because there's a stronger sense that right things will work out right just because of the rules. Western corruption happens on a different level: a regular western citizen has no benefit from giving bribes and he would object to the police or government officials from demanding one. Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.
This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.
An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is merely an part of the narrative.
In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off the people and held accountable under the same legal standard they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop following the rules the narrative breaks.
And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held their position almost entirely by the mechanism of unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the narratives of western democracy.
*We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply not available anymore.
like people in democracies do not know how good they have it!
This is essential - too often what we see is persecution of whistle-blowers instead ( with the wrong-headed logic that it's the revealing of wrong doing that's somehow the problem, rather than the wrong doing itself ).
The "four types of corruption" breakdown by Yuen Yuen Ang I think is really informative here, with its two-axis breakdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#:~:text=Petty%20the...).
Amalgamating all corruption into a single corruption index doesn't distinguish between these types, and it seems reasonable that different "flavors" of corruption impact social trust in different ways.
Autocracies are low-resolution systems trading on vague promises of 'order' and the explicit assumption of prerogative. In that framework, an official favoring their own isn't 'breaking' the machine; they are exercising it. You can't lose trust in a promise of impartiality that was never made. For the democratic actor, corruption is a breach of contract; for everyone else, it’s just the weather.
In the US, it seems corruption is only allowed at the top. If you tried to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket as a regular person, you'd get in big trouble, then meanwhile the president pardons wealthy fraudsters [1].
Meanwhile, in countries like Russia, everyone can get in on the action. A colleague of mine told me if he were to get drafted to the war, he knew exactly how much to pay and who to pay off locally to get his name off the list. It's equal opportunity corruption.
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/nikola-founder-trevor-milt...
Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.
Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).
Also I wouldn't bother comparing corruption between democracies and authoritarians. I have lived under both and the only thing I see is the common human nature represented in different ways. And I see "lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation" everywhere.
I guess that's why we are in a world that keeps competing for incompetence.
by "democracy" they of course mean liberalism
Yes, those who pay receive special benefits, but it is against the background threat of reprisal if you cease paying.
Hey, that's a nice software company, it would be a shame if something happened to it. By the way, my son is raising money for his new crypto venture. You should think about investing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...
However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust that comes with these types of social structures and they usually trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here, but in reality people more often than not just want to live their life.
Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote transparency so there is trust that your government is being transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything due to corruption you check out and start disliking your government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil down to the same thing.
In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and corruption and we are now beginning to understand the butterfly effects.
India hasn’t had a very long authoritarian regime since its independence. Yet, corruption has existed at every touch point with the government and shows no signs of reduction. In India, getting a driver’s license or getting a passport (for which there’s a “police verification” step) or buying/selling real estate or filing a police complaint or getting some work done in a court of law or even getting the final rites of a deceased person (burial or cremation) done require bribes in most places.
Also, paying a bribe means standing in line with the rest of the people who paid bribes. Things don’t move fast just because money exchanged hands.
All this is to say that I don’t know what to make of your statement on authoritarian vs. democratic regimes (though you mentioned “western”). The main factor seems to be the culture and what others here have described as low trust vs high trust.
Our districts are embarrassing. People tolerating the blatant corruption by the Trump administration is something I don't understand. They will get upset about Epstein, but don't care about the corruption. (See for example the recent Jared Kushner contracts for one of many examples) Congress campaigns funded by PACs.
Phrases of interest: "Conflict of interest". "Shame". It is wild how people still vote for corrupted politicians, which is almost all of them. My parents are the prototype. If you take money from corporate-funded interests, you still have a conflict of interest, even if you aren't caught acting in the favor of those corporations.
A rich person buying their way into power (either through gaining a formal position or influence) robs the people of that society of their power, which is a limited resource. There is no upside to it, if it were good for the people at large there would be no need for the corruption.
Conversely, a powerful person enriching themself can be a good thing. A crony being put in charge of a state owned corporation, for example, doesn't really take anything away from the common person. It's not like you were in line to be the CEO of a random oil company. So long as your material condition is improving, the rising tide is lifting your boat, who cares if the tide is also lifting someone else's bigger boat. This sort of corruption aligns the interests of the powerful with the economic well being of the nation - the better things are run, the more comfortable the leaders will be - and it's certainly preferable to other ways they could potentially abuse their power. Who wants to be lead by someone so incompetent that they can't find a way to skim a little off the top?
We in democratic society also don't really mind too much if a person achieves tremendous wealth so long as they don't dilute our power. Whether they be startup founders, business moguls, movie stars, rock stars, reality tv stars, socialites spending daddy's money, so long as they stay out of politics and avoid accusations of heinous crimes we not only put up with them, we idolize them. That's not to say that the Kardashians are morally equivalent to the current CEO of Gazprom in terms of how they gained their fortune, but none of us are under the illusion that their wealth is the consequence of hard work providing a much needed good or service to society at large, and if they leverage their status to make even more money that's not going to erode our social trust in any meaningful way.
See things like Digital ID, censorship, surveillance - nobody voted for this, but certain wealth managers want this to happen and so it takes priority over issues that actually people would want to be resolved (housing, healthcare to name a few).
Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N= population size).
My other friend forgot his drivers license at home while being non-white and was arrested/charged and forced to explain why he didn’t bring his license to a judge.
Where this fails is when the person who wants to get things going their way doesn’t have enough money. And that’s why it’s usually paired with inequality as well.
Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15 target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage.
To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ was pardoned).
Edit: this article is an example of a circular research. Create a narrative branding target entities - in this case countries - with a positive or negative characteristic. For some reason the Scandinavians revel in this.
Another example of compromised organisations are the various US govt funded "think tanks" which publish annual reports which are then used to classify whoever they want with whatever they want. Which then the US regime uses as a pretext for unprovoked attacks.
The West is an example of systemic corruption at the highest levels, surpassed only their citizens collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Not at a governmental level, and not powered by cash, but it is seen when working for companies.
Managers are highly corruptible - it's got next to nothing to do with the output of a given worker, instead it's about their ability to "kiss up" (something framed as "soft skills")
Russia is considered a corrupt country by the West, but I have never bribed anyone and never felt that a bribe is expected.
>better high school by having them display academic excellence
Worked just fine for me.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg for an excellent explanation of it. And also an explanation of why the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network. Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals that others couldn't.
I think increasingly this describes how things work in the US, if we broaden our definition of "corruption" a bit to include things like corporations stealing your data, charging hidden fees, etc.
That's a red herring:
> We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals.
That couldn't be the case if autocracy meant a "society that has no trust." You're just speculating (or perhaps "anecdozing") while the article is attempting to measure these things.
Edit: clarification
China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
The bar they set is incredibly high unless it involves a politician they don’t support, then a rumor is enough for them to go “yeah I knew it.”
Where it breaks down is the stage where the cronies being put in charge aren't competent, and their only qualification is their proximity to power. Then (too much of?) the tide gets diverted, and most of the boats stop rising.
I can think of no examples where a society that permits leadership-by-crony did not reach that end-state.
Technically, maybe yes? But autocrats tend to use "de facto authorized" corruption as a carrot for their loyal supporters, and "arrested for corruption" as the corresponding stick. Which leads to outcomes little different from an absolute dictatorship.
Except the autocrat now has a convenient scapegoat for problems affecting the populace - corrupt officials - and a nice narrative for explaining the sudden removals of officials whose loyalties or performance were not to the autocrat's liking.
This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now.
A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in.
Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”
The availability of corruption is a huge grease for economic activity and weirdly - order - but soviet type of corruption has a massive flaw that bad corruption bets (big impact, high publicity) would be mostly unpunished. In asia however it's quite interesting how the face saving and family culture corrects for that a bit as bad corruption bets will backfire despite lack of legal framework for cleanup.
Unfortunately it's _not_ equal opportunity corruption as low economic classes are left out and suffer the most, the cruelty of these systems are really hard to put in the words of a single comment. This also creates a massive overhead for corruption beaurocracy where entire positions are found not on actual product or activity but corruption "middle managers".
So despite your friends take this is not a good system on it's own and merely a relief for terrible autocratic rule. Autocrats actually actively allow corruption as this relief is what keeps them in power precisely because people with some power get a relief and poor class bears the slave worker burden.
But which laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President are mostly determined by financial donations more so than public opinion.
It does not take a very high number to make most capital investments look really bad.
And you compare that (investing in something new), to instead using the capital to bribe your way into the “system”.
...and look how nice it sounds it live in Russia.
EDIT: commenters are still all referring to Singapore which I remind you is the very rare outlier case.
Incorrect. You can’t do it without cooperation. You can cooperate without trust.
Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun. You bring in people with licenses and accreditation, 3rd party consultants, etc, etc. All of this work and expense is incurred so that if things go wrong then the parties all have precisely defined ways in which they can (expensively) drag the matter through a courtroom and whatever comes of that will be enforced with state violence.
Contrast with (certain parts of) the far east and eastern europe. The west is the low trust environment.
In my country the politicians are openly very corrupt. (Well, possibly yours too ;)
Recently there has been a lot of improvement to the infrastructure. I realized that what has happened is, a lot of EU funds have been made available for development, and people are lining up to skim a little bit off the top.
How you say, the incentives are aligned, yeah?
I find myself in the odd situation where for each dollar that gets embezzled, a little bit of actual construction happens. That seems like a force you'd want to work with, rather than against.
I mean yeah ideally we'd get rid of corruption, but haha good luck with that. At least now they're fixing the roads.
The Soviet Union did manage to get massive leaps in some areas (in particular related to armament, but not only) such as
- armament/weapons
- space technology
- mathematics
- physics
> (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).
I guess you can immediately see how the Soviet Union "solved" this problem by the fact that you simply couldn't gain a lot of money from your innovation.
The country I live in consistently ranks as rather non-corrupt but I would disagree with this assessment since I know that our biggest party (where I was a member for some years) is slavishly loyal to one of our main 'stock market owner families', and would consider a lot of legal practices and regulations highly corrupt. Clearly this is also outside of the scope of this study.
This key dynamic is what Russians call blat. My explanation of it is summarized from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg.
When we witness corruption, our trust is eroded the distance between how we think that things should work, and how they do work.
In a democracy, there are official rules about how things are supposed to work. Those rules are how we expect things to work. Therefore, encountering corruption violates our expectations. And reduces our trust.
In an autocracy, nobody expects that the official rules are how things actually work. You don't say that - doing so is dangerous - but everybody knows it.
However behind the scenes, people learn to cope. And a key part of coping is a blat network. This is the classic, "I know someone who knows someone who can make this happen..." In other words, people develop personal networks of others that they trust.
This trust is not eroded by encountering official corruption - that's expected.
This trust is also not eroded by having to grease a few palms as part of getting something through the blat network. In fact it is improved. You expect to have to pay something. The whole point of a blat network is to get something otherwise unavailable, or at a better price than you otherwise could. And so these encounters with corruption increase your trust in the power and effectiveness of your personal network!
Now go watch that video. It explains that what Jeffrey Epstein was doing was running a blat network. The availability of sex crimes was social proof that created trust among elites in what Jeffrey Epstein could do. His real money came from fundraising, brokering deals, and so on. For example Leon Black paid Epstein about $158 million for financial advice, such as structuring tax shelters. (Care to bet whether Epstein's connections made the IRS less likely to question those arrangements?) Bill Gates paid him some unknown amount for brokering deals with JP Morgan, meeting Saudi princes, etc.
We, the general public, have mostly focused on the sex crimes. But we should also be concerned about the normalization of corruption as "business as usual" among elites. Because politics is like a fish - it rots from the head. Corruption at the top will not forever remain corruption at the top. If left unchecked, it will some day be corruption for all of us.
I love how media is in this game , printing endless articles how customers are really supposed to pay tips because poor server. And even when customers are revolting against tipping culture it is going from 25% to 22% as a way of speaking truth to power.
Science (broadly understood) looks for explanation and for verification. The point is to understand. Many interesting things may be found by analysis of what is known.
I think you’re right that culture plays a key role. For example if small bribes are customary, that doesn’t erode trust, that’s just the way things are.
I am not quite sure, how exactly you mean "trust". For example there are countries, that I would consider quite corrupt, but that are able to leap ahead. I would say there can be a lot of trust, even in a corrupt system, if the ones making the leap, are part of the corrupt system, and trust that system to continue to "work". But you could say: "Well, then there is trust!"
Ultimately, I think where there is more trust, there is more to destroy, so any betrayal of this trust, causes more damage, than in a low trust environment, where there was not much trust to begin with.
Was kinda eye-opening as a native-born U.S. citizen. I'd always just assumed things worked according to the rules here, but then after he said it, I started seeing corruption at the top all the time.
Now let's look at the US:
Tucker Carlson is under the gun for allegedly being a Russian or is it Iranian agent. But the US is a democracy.
https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-foreign-agent-charge...
It's a difficult concept to translate to English because it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors, and each individual transaction within your blat network may involve different things. It could be money, it could be access to a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be time or labor.
Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing problems for you and your family, for free or for a low price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can always buy cheese because you set some aside for him. That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an engineer though so he can help tutor their child in mathematics.
They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very laissez faire way of work.
I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar issues etc.
It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind of try to force things into these standard flows.
Which also doesn't work, but it accountably doesn't work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc.
This is how most places turn into that meme picture where there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.
My company took the biggest telecom company in France to court for a violation of our license on a soft, license was GPLv2, we won, but it took 12 years.
Justice is a very poor and slow institution in France. For the same countries the budget of police forces per capita are nearly the same for example.
For (2) China doesn't look too different from the U.S., for (3) experts think it has gotten much worse since the time of Mao but I'd say China is on the honest side of the "global South".
Note that lay perceptions of corruption are widespread in the US
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51398-most-americans-see-c...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/185759/widespread-government-co...
https://www.occrp.org/en/news/survey-reveals-corruption-as-t...
though unlike India I think very few Americans have paid a bribe to a cop. See also
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
There are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:
- China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to significantly improve the standard of living of most of its population.
- The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of corruption.
- The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential" and "only for scientific purposes".
Well your population grows trough migration, your land does not and your construction doesn't match either in a long term inflationary environment with every incentive pointing in the continuation of that path.
See also Canada, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Australia, etc, etc
"As intended" is something that doesn't exist at all.
Singapore has yet to have a leader willing to take over the system, because two of its leaders were the dynasty that created the system. The real test is what happens when someone like that shows up; but even Western democracies face this problem, it’s just that the system has more built in speed bumps to overcome.
One key difference is the extent the authorities have discretionary powers. Can they do whatever the consider necessary to do their jobs (until the courts tell otherwise), or do they only have the powers explicitly given by the law? Common law systems tend to favor discretionary powers, but they vary on how eager the courts are to keep the officials in check. Civil law systems can be anywhere on the spectrum, but it's usually a legislative choice made in advance rather than a judicial choice made after the fact.
On the flip side, if nobody else requires bribes but you do, you will surely stick out like a sore thumb. If I don't get paid bribes and I am an influential powerful person, why should I pay you any bribes? Especially for something that is legitimate and a part of your duties?
Furthermore, I’m tired of the false equivalence some people in this thread draw between the level of corruption in democracies and authoritarian regimes. They are simply not on the same scale - if you ever experienced both you would know that.
At worst the person gets fired and is prohibited from public sector jobs at that tier of government afterwards for a period of time while the story is fresh in peoples minds, in the rare case the plutocratic owned media let's such a story come out of its mass media products about the not-paid-for bureaucratic elements of government in hopes of reducing polarization that comes from over-promoting one of the arbitrarily different parties as a means of providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing participants.
The west is just a shorthand for countries within the global north that are part of the international liberal order. This is all well established terminology, including "western imperialism" and "western hegemony". Its not our fault you are hearing these words for the very first time.
can democratic societies be corrupt, can autocratic societies be not corrupt this is also true.
accept things as they're, not as they ought to be - one of the fundamental lessons one has to learn to operate in this world.
If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to document and hedge against the risk via contracts and insurance, as you point out.
If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only interact with counterparties that you can trust or have direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share personal or reputational connections.
Trump tried to solicit bribes from anthropic, retaliated by violating the DoW contracts when they didn’t pay, and then somehow forced Dario to publicly apologize for bringing the matter to light. Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI?
Look at the car industry, where the corruption and coercion started earlier. For some reason, Trump used ICE to illegally detain a bunch of Kia engineers. They announced they’re not going to add more trimlines to their EV lines in the US.
Honda announced they’re canceling planes to build three new model lines in Ohio.
The macro statistics are dire. Pre-Biden, US factory investment was $80B per year. Trump wiped $30B off that number in 2025. Biden got it up to $240B, so Trump “only” wiped out 10-15%, but, because he was starting from a high number, the damage is equivalent to 35% of all factory investment that existed when he last left office!
The rate at which industrial production is fleeing the US is increasing. This year, the loss will probably be greater than the entire 2018 US factory investment base.
There are similar trends happening in tech and academia. There’s not much left once that happens. (Insurance, banking and marketing, mostly.)
Sounds like formalized corruption to me.
But the wealthy write the rules.
This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.
There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.
When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.
In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.
But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust. I suggest you read more about this.
In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to spend time and money on any of that because you know you’re one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next bonfire.
So yes, in areas with high corruption they don’t bother. They either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local judge’s son to an empty position of power so that they can win anything that goes to “court”. That’s not a sign of high trust, that’s an acknowledgment there’s no point in bothering.
That is the problem, how you get corruption to go the way you want?
Lots of politicians see Paulo Maluf, and think they can imitate him, that they will be beloved by the public and steal money somehow and line their own pockets, except those are too self-serving or too incompetent to pull that off properly, so they steal in ways that go against the public.
So for example in one city where I lived, one mayor stole the money from the kids lunch, resulting in hungry kids. Another mayor stole ludicrous amounts of money from garbage collection services, the result is that the city ended with debts in the billions while being a tiny city (it has 100k people, yet has debts bigger than cities with millions of people).
Paulo Maluf meanwhile built lots of useful infrastructure that is still in use. (also hilariously he used to brag a lot using the phrase "Maluf that did it!", one time some comedic journalists went to a bridge opening, and asked him who did the bridge, he replied: "Maluf didn't do this bridge. But he did the two roads the bridge are connecting, so there is no bridge without Maluf!")
those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work cheaply so they can skim more “off the top”
And you still need to fight corruption to some level or it will come to a point where there’s more skimming than work being done
However, the loans they owed to that bank were still good, and would get bought by an "investor" for pennies on the dollar. They no longer had their bank account to make their normal loan payments from, yet the full repayments were still due, despite the original bank that made the loan going under and closing its doors.
So many farmers ended up having to sell or foreclose on their farms and then attempt to rent them back from the new owners.
I'm asking because all I could find was a list on Twitter that didn't cite any sources itself and also had very implausible numbers (including he 12k/year for the UK). Implausible based on the lived reality of friends of mine living in e.g. the UK or Germany.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/good_old_boy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network#United_States
Of course, it has several connotations depending on exact context.
The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually.
In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.
That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguish pairs of sounds that differ in our language. English doesn't have a lot of words with a "ya" sound, and so to us "я"and "а" are easy to confuse. It is easy to confuse "d" and "t". But the easier to hear distinction is a hard sign т versus the soft sign on дь. But hard versus soft isn't even a concept in English, so you're not listening for it.
Mathematics and (theoretical) physics are capital-light research sectors. Weapons platforms and space technology were state managed (I.e. didn’t require private sector capital financing).
Mathematics and Physics maybe but not in a way that benefited the broader society overall.
Or perhaps in all of these examples the plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility from the government to ration a scarce resource?
No one, left or right, thinks there is street level corruption. Not the kind accessible to someone in a traffic stop. I have experienced it in Mexico and think that kind of corruption would still be worse because I cannot imagine how to recover from it. I have hope that a few high profile arrests of c level fall his may turn the tide. If not then there are extrajudicial methods open to American culture.
This 100%.
Political imprisonment and reeducation camps are antithetical to any definition of a high trust society that I would subscribe to.
That is China is a complex country and books (which are not written and many cannot be for decades yet) are needed to understand this, not a short comment box. [This applies to every other country anyone here mentions]
They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.
Introduction:
While corruption exists in both democracies and autocracies, its social consequences may differ fundamentally across regime types. Democratic norms of equality and impartiality make trust highly sensitive to institutional failure. We theorize two mechanisms—normative amplification and representative contagion—by which corruption erodes trust more in democracies. In democracies, corruption violates core fairness norms and implicates the citizenry that elected corrupt officials. In autocracies, corruption is expected and elites are seen as separate from ordinary citizens.
Methods:
To test this theory, we perform multilevel analysis of data from 62 countries combining individual-level survey responses with country-level democratic quality indicators.
Results:
We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals. We then show this individual-level psychological mechanism is considerably stronger in democracies than in autocracies, even controlling for inequality and country-level corruption.
Discussion:
These findings reveal an asymmetric vulnerability: the accountability structures that make democracies function also make their social capital fragile. This has important implications for understanding democratic resilience, as corruption threatens the social trust necessary for democratic cooperation differently across regime types.
Democracy may be uniquely sensitive to certain threats. Recent scholarship on democratic backsliding reveals how democracies can erode from within when norms decay and institutions weaken (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). In this article, we identify a specific sensitivity: in democracies, social capital appears to be particularly responsive to corruption.
We theorize that this sensitivity arises from democracy’s foundational commitments to equality and impartiality. These commitments may create two psychological mechanisms that amplify corruption’s impact on social trust. First, normative amplification: in democracies, where universalism is the professed ideal, corruption may signal a breach of the social contract. Citizens may infer that if the institutions meant to embody fairness are compromised, the wider society is untrustworthy. In autocracies, by contrast, where particularism is expected, corruption confirms business as usual rather than signaling societal rot. Second, representative contagion: in democracies, corrupt officials are viewed as emanating from “the people” through elections, potentially implicating the citizenry itself. In autocracies, predatory elites are seen as a distinct class, quarantining interpersonal trust from elite malfeasance. If these mechanisms operate as theorized, then the individual-level psychological process linking corruption perceptions to social distrust should be regime-dependent—strong in democracies, weak in autocracies.
A study by You (2018) provides suggestive evidence for our thesis. Using country-level data on social trust and corruption, and studying democracies and autocracies separately, he demonstrated that more corruption is strongly associated with weaker social trust among democracies—but not among autocracies. This striking pattern is consistent with our theory. However, as the finding was obtained at the aggregate level, it leaves open whether it reflects genuine differences in how individuals psychologically process corruption, or whether it is an artifact of other phenomena.
The present paper aims to provide individual-level evidence for how trust among people in democracies may be especially sensitive to corruption. After replicating You’s country-level findings in more recent data from 62 countries—covering the full spectrum from autocracies like Russia and Iran to stable liberal democracies like New Zealand and Netherlands—we use multilevel modeling to test whether a corresponding individual-level pattern exists. We find that individuals’ perceptions of corruption are associated with lower generalized trust in democracies, while this same individual-level association is substantially weaker or absent in autocracies. These findings suggest an asymmetry in how corruption relates to social trust across regime types. While democracies foster high social trust through their institutions, they may simultaneously make that social capital more vulnerable to perceptions of institutional failure. This may be the price of accountability: the very norms that make democracies function—equality, representation, transparency—may also ensure that institutional failures resonate in citizens’ social worldviews.
Social trust—the belief that most people can be trusted—has long been recognized as a cornerstone of democratic societies (Putnam, 1993; Fukuyama, 1995). It facilitates civic cooperation, lowers transaction costs, and enables the collective action necessary for democratic governance (Ostrom, 2000; Knack and Keefer, 1997).
A dominant answer in the literature for what erodes this resource is corruption. When citizens perceive that public officials are acting dishonestly, they infer that the wider society is untrustworthy (Uslaner, 2002; Rothstein, 2011; Rothstein and Stolle, 2008). Rothstein and Uslaner (2005) argue that corruption and social trust are linked through perceptions of fairness: corruption signals that the system is rigged in favor of the connected, undermining the belief that others will play by the rules. Similarly, You (2005) emphasizes that corruption generates perceptions of unfairness that erode the foundation of generalized trust. This creates a “vicious circle” where corruption breeds distrust, which in turn facilitates more corruption by undermining collective enforcement of norms (della Porta, 2000; Rose-Ackerman and Palifka, 2016). Empirical research has documented this negative association across diverse contexts (Chang and Chu, 2006; Morris and Klesner, 2010; Richey, 2010; Seligson, 2002).
Importantly, experimental evidence confirms that this relationship is causal: exposing individuals to information about institutional corruption reduces their generalized trust in others. Rothstein and Eek (2009) demonstrate that Swedish participants randomly assigned to scenarios depicting corrupt public officials subsequently express lower trust in strangers. Martinangeli et al. (2024) replicate this finding across multiple countries, showing that learning about poor institutional quality causally reduces generalized trust. These experimental studies establish that the corruption-trust link reflects a genuine psychological mechanism, not merely spurious correlation. Corruption perceptions also have broader psychological consequences: research shows that perceived corruption is associated with increased conspiracy beliefs (Alper, 2023; Cordonier et al., 2021; Cordonier and Cafiero, 2024), suggesting that corruption undermines not only interpersonal trust but also trust in official explanations and institutions more broadly.
However, this narrative is challenged by You's (2018) finding that country-level corruption is not associated with lower social trust in autocracies. To reconcile these findings, we propose that regime type moderates how individuals interpret and react to corruption. In other words, we suggest that regime type influences the very individual-level mechanism that links corruption perceptions to trust. This approach builds on previous work using cross-level interaction models to examine how country-level factors moderate individual-level relationships (Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012).
We propose two micro-level mechanisms whereby individuals in democracies should exhibit a stronger psychological link between corruption perceptions and generalized trust than individuals in autocracies.
Democratic and autocratic regimes establish fundamentally different normative frameworks. Democracies are built on principles of equality before the law and impartial treatment of citizens (Dahl, 1998). The norm of impartiality—treating citizens equally regardless of their connections or status—is central to the legitimacy of democratic governance (Rothstein and Teorell, 2008; Mungiu-Pippidi, 2015). When officials engage in favoritism or bribery, they betray not just administrative rules but the core promise of democratic governance. This normative amplification means that for individuals living in democracies, corruption signals a fundamental breach of the social contract: if the institutions meant to embody fairness are compromised, why should strangers be trustworthy? (Warren, 2004). In autocracies, by contrast, particularism—the allocation of public goods based on personal connections rather than universal rules—is often the norm rather than the exception (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2006). Corruption is endemic and expected. When individuals perceive corruption in such contexts, it confirms business as usual rather than signaling a breakdown of social order. The psychological link between corruption perceptions and generalized trust is therefore attenuated: corruption is discounted as a survival strategy within a known system (Smith, 2007).
In democracies, officials are selected through competitive elections and are supposed to represent “the people” (Manin, 1997). This creates what we term representative contagion: when individuals observe that elected officials are corrupt, they may infer that their fellow citizens, who selected these officials and whom these officials represent, are also untrustworthy. The corruption of representatives becomes psychological evidence about the represented (Rothstein and Eek, 2009). In autocracies, by contrast, predatory elites are typically viewed as a distinct class, separate from and often opposed to ordinary citizens (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012). Their corruption is contained within the political sphere and does not implicate horizontal relationships among citizens. This quarantines interpersonal trust from elite malfeasance. Individuals can maintain trust in their neighbors while simultaneously acknowledging that the ruling class is corrupt (Ledeneva, 2013).
Assuming either, or both, of these mechanisms operate, we obtain three testable hypotheses that build progressively from aggregate patterns to individual-level mechanisms to cross-national moderation. The first hypothesis is that You’s (2018) finding is robust:
H1: At the country level, the association between perceived corruption and generalized trust is strong among democracies and weak or absent among autocracies.
The second hypothesis is that, consistent with the experimental literature, perceiving corruption is generally associated with lower trust in other people.
H2: Within countries, individuals who perceive higher levels of corruption have lower generalized trust.
The third hypothesis is that, consistent with the mechanisms outlined above, the effect of perceiving corruption on trust varies with regime type.
H3: Perceptions of corruption predict lower generalized trust more strongly in democracies than in autocracies.
We combine individual-level data from the most recent wave (2017–2022) of the World Values Survey (WVS; Haerpfer et al., 2022) with country-level indicators (averaged across the same period) of democratic quality from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project (Coppedge et al., 2025; Pemstein et al., 2025). Our analysis includes 62 countries for which we have complete data on all variables of interest. We use WVS Wave 7 (2017–2022) because it contains the corruption perception module required for our analysis. Although a Joint EVS/WVS dataset exists with 92 countries, the European Values Survey does not include the corruption perception items, making it unsuitable for our purposes. Our 62 countries therefore represent the full set of countries with complete data on perceived corruption, generalized trust, and democratic quality indicators.
The WVS provides our key individual-level measures. Generalized trust is measured by the standard question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Responses are coded 1 for “most people can be trusted” and 0 otherwise. Perceived corruption is measured by asking respondents how widespread they believe corruption to be among public officials, on a scale from 1 (there is no corruption in my country) to 10 (there is abundant corruption in my country). While corruption perceptions may not perfectly align with objective corruption levels (Charron, 2016), perceptions are presumably what directly affect individual trust judgments.
We include standard individual-level controls: age (five categories: 18–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60+), gender (male/female), education (three levels based on ISCED categories: low, medium, high), household income (three levels based on the WVS 10-point scale: low [1–3], medium [4–7], high [8–10]), and employment status (three categories: employed [full-time, part-time, or self-employed], not in labor force [retired, homemaker, or student], and unemployed/other).
From V-Dem, we use two measures of democratic quality: the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification and the Liberal Democracy Index. The RoW (Lührmann et al., 2018) is a categorical measure distinguishing closed autocracies (no multiparty elections), electoral autocracies (multiparty elections that are not free and fair), electoral democracies (free elections but limited liberal protections), and liberal democracies (free elections with strong liberal protections). Following our theoretical framework—which emphasizes that the mechanisms of normative amplification and representative contagion require genuine electoral accountability—we create a binary classification: democracies (electoral and liberal democracies, RoW = 2–3) versus autocracies (closed and electoral autocracies, RoW = 0–1). Electoral autocracies are classified as autocracies because, despite having multiparty elections, these elections lack the competitive integrity necessary for the representative contagion mechanism to operate.
In contrast to the categorical RoW measure, the Liberal Democracy Index is a continuous measure, which captures both electoral and liberal dimensions of democracy, including the quality of elections, checks on executive power, equality before the law, and individual liberties. This index ranges from 0 (least democratic) to 1 (most democratic). We use the Liberal Democracy Index rather than the Electoral Democracy Index (also known as Polyarchy) because our theoretical mechanisms—normative amplification and representative contagion—depend on features beyond electoral procedures. The liberal component of the Liberal Democracy Index captures the rule of law, checks on executive power, and equality before the law, which are central to our argument that corruption in democracies violates norms of impartiality. In robustness analyses, we also test whether results hold using the Electoral Democracy Index as an alternative moderator.
Our research design tests three progressively refined hypotheses outlined above.
To test H1, we calculate country-level aggregates of perceived corruption and generalized trust, then examine whether their correlation differs when calculated separately among democracies and autocracies as defined by the RoW categorization. H1 predicts a strong negative correlation between perceived corruption and generalized trust among democracies but a weaker correlation among autocracies.
The above dichotomous analysis matches the original approach of You (2018). As a continuous alternative, we also examine the interaction between perceived corruption and the Liberal Democracy Index in a multiple regression analysis of country-level generalized trust. H1 predicts a negative interaction, representing a stronger negative effect of corruption in more democratic countries.
To test whether the aggregate pattern reflects genuine individual-level mechanisms (H2) and whether these mechanisms vary by regime type (H3), we estimate a random-intercept, random-slope multilevel logistic regression model. This approach models the hierarchical structure of the data, with individuals nested within countries. Standard errors appropriately reflect uncertainty at both levels.
At Level 1 (individual), generalized trust is modeled as a function of perceived corruption, controlling for demographic characteristics (age, gender, education, income, and employment status). At Level 2 (country), we allow both the intercept and the slope for perceived corruption to vary across countries. Crucially, we include a cross-level interaction between perceived corruption and the Liberal Democracy Index (treated as a continuous variable), which directly tests H3: whether the individual-level corruption-trust relationship varies with democratic quality. In other words, the cross-level interaction estimates whether the psychological mechanism linking corruption perceptions to trust operates differently depending on institutional context.
Formally, the model can be expressed as follows:
Level 1 (Individual):
Level 2 (Country):
where is the probability of expressing trust for individual i in country j; is perceived corruption (grand-mean centered); is a vector of demographic controls; is the Liberal Democracy Index (grand-mean centered); is the cross-level interaction coefficient testing H3; and , are country-level random effects assumed to follow a bivariate normal distribution.
For computational efficiency with large sample sizes (>85,000 individuals), we use an aggregated binomial approach. Observations are grouped by country, corruption level, and demographic categories, and trust incidence is modeled using a binomial distribution. This yields estimates identical to individual-level analysis but with substantially improved computational performance. Both perceived corruption and the Liberal Democracy Index are grand-mean centered to facilitate interpretation of main effects.
We also conduct robustness checks including: (1) adding competing cross-level moderators to test whether these factors can account for the democracy moderation; (2) testing press freedom, the Electoral Democracy Index, and state resilience (Travaglino et al., 2025) as alternative moderators in separate models (as their high correlations with liberal democracy, r = 0.90 and 0.78 respectively, preclude simultaneous estimation); and (3) leave-one-out analyses to ensure no single country drives the results.
For competing moderators, we include economic inequality (Gini coefficient from SWIID; Solt, 2020), political polarization (from V-Dem), and measures of digital information access. We include both social media use as a self-reported news source (country-level mean from WVS item on frequency of obtaining political information from social media) and internet penetration (percentage of population using the internet; World Bank, 2024).
If our theory is correct, we should observe a negative main association between corruption perceptions and trust at the individual level (H2) and a negative cross-level interaction, indicating that the corruption-trust relationship is stronger (more negative) in more democratic countries (H3).
Table 1 presents the 62 countries, ordered by the Liberal Democracy Index, with their results for generalized trust and perceived corruption.
Table 1
| Country | Regime type (RoW) | Liberal democracy index | N | Generalized trust (%) | Perceived corruption M (SD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand | Democracy | 0.83 | 1,057 | 59.5 | 5.52 (2.37) |
| Germany | Democracy | 0.83 | 1,528 | 46.0 | 5.58 (2.22) |
| Netherlands | Democracy | 0.82 | 2,145 | 61.2 | 6.20 (2.16) |
| Uruguay | Democracy | 0.81 | 1,000 | 14.9 | 7.70 (2.29) |
| Australia | Democracy | 0.80 | 1813 | 54.0 | 6.65 (2.28) |
| United Kingdom | Democracy | 0.79 | 3,056 | 45.8 | 7.10 (2.25) |
| Chile | Democracy | 0.79 | 1,000 | 14.3 | 7.10 (2.11) |
| Korea South | Democracy | 0.78 | 1,245 | 32.9 | 6.51 (1.59) |
| Canada | Democracy | 0.76 | 4,018 | 49.5 | 6.73 (2.00) |
| Japan | Democracy | 0.75 | 1,353 | 35.6 | 6.88 (2.06) |
| United States | Democracy | 0.74 | 2,596 | 39.7 | 7.83 (2.10) |
| Slovak Republic | Democracy | 0.74 | 1,200 | 21.6 | 7.81 (1.91) |
| Czech Republic | Democracy | 0.73 | 1,200 | 37.3 | 7.06 (2.00) |
| Taiwan | Democracy | 0.72 | 1,223 | 31.0 | 7.61 (2.10) |
| Greece | Democracy | 0.70 | 1,200 | 8.4 | 8.37 (1.70) |
| Cyprus | Democracy | 0.70 | 1,000 | 8.0 | 8.23 (1.91) |
| Peru | Democracy | 0.68 | 1,400 | 5.3 | 9.51 (1.21) |
| Argentina | Democracy | 0.64 | 1,003 | 20.7 | 8.51 (1.63) |
| Brazil | Democracy | 0.57 | 1762 | 6.6 | 9.45 (1.57) |
| Romania | Democracy | 0.56 | 1,257 | 11.9 | 8.73 (1.85) |
| Tunisia | Democracy | 0.53 | 1,208 | 14.2 | 8.16 (2.41) |
| Colombia | Democracy | 0.53 | 1,520 | 4.5 | 9.48 (1.48) |
| Mongolia | Democracy | 0.51 | 1,638 | 27.5 | 7.60 (2.20) |
| Armenia | Democracy | 0.47 | 1,223 | 8.1 | 7.55 (2.70) |
| Ecuador | Democracy | 0.45 | 1,200 | 5.9 | 8.88 (1.84) |
| Indonesia | Democracy | 0.44 | 3,200 | 5.2 | 8.38 (2.51) |
| Kenya | Autocracy | 0.41 | 1,266 | 9.6 | 8.46 (2.36) |
| Mexico | Democracy | 0.41 | 1741 | 10.3 | 8.87 (2.05) |
| Guatemala | Democracy | 0.39 | 1,229 | 18.0 | 9.14 (1.67) |
| Nigeria | Democracy | 0.36 | 1,237 | 12.7 | 8.74 (2.18) |
| Maldives | Democracy | 0.34 | 1,039 | 21.3 | 9.27 (1.45) |
| Singapore | Autocracy | 0.33 | 2012 | 34.0 | 3.52 (1.99) |
| India | Autocracy | 0.32 | 1,692 | 17.7 | 7.77 (2.27) |
| Bolivia | Democracy | 0.32 | 2067 | 8.6 | 8.63 (1.94) |
| Philippines | Autocracy | 0.30 | 1,200 | 5.3 | 6.73 (2.71) |
| Malaysia | Autocracy | 0.30 | 1,313 | 19.6 | 8.00 (2.00) |
| Ukraine | Autocracy | 0.28 | 1,289 | 30.7 | 8.41 (1.88) |
| Lebanon | Autocracy | 0.28 | 1,200 | 9.9 | 7.83 (2.03) |
| Kyrgyzstan | Autocracy | 0.28 | 1,200 | 11.8 | 8.90 (2.09) |
| Serbia | Autocracy | 0.27 | 1,046 | 16.6 | 8.39 (1.92) |
| Pakistan | Autocracy | 0.25 | 1995 | 23.5 | 8.70 (2.06) |
| Jordan | Autocracy | 0.24 | 1,203 | 16.0 | 8.20 (2.27) |
| Iraq | Autocracy | 0.24 | 1,200 | 11.2 | 8.78 (1.73) |
| Morocco | Autocracy | 0.24 | 1,200 | 16.5 | 7.70 (2.00) |
| Hong Kong SAR | Autocracy | 0.22 | 2075 | 39.5 | 5.44 (2.03) |
| Zimbabwe | Autocracy | 0.20 | 1,215 | 2.1 | 8.55 (2.57) |
| Myanmar (Burma) | Autocracy | 0.17 | 1,200 | 15.1 | 7.38 (2.56) |
| Thailand | Autocracy | 0.16 | 1,500 | 31.4 | 6.97 (2.35) |
| Libya | Autocracy | 0.14 | 1,196 | 9.3 | 9.12 (1.55) |
| Ethiopia | Autocracy | 0.14 | 1,230 | 11.9 | 8.65 (2.21) |
| Egypt | Autocracy | 0.12 | 1,200 | 7.4 | 8.52 (1.81) |
| Kazakhstan | Autocracy | 0.12 | 1,276 | 23.9 | 6.98 (2.27) |
| Vietnam | Autocracy | 0.11 | 1,200 | 27.7 | 7.37 (2.13) |
| Turkey | Autocracy | 0.11 | 2,415 | 14.3 | 6.57 (2.22) |
| Iran | Autocracy | 0.11 | 1,499 | 14.8 | 6.77 (3.13) |
| Bangladesh | Autocracy | 0.10 | 1,200 | 12.9 | 7.75 (2.06) |
| Russia | Autocracy | 0.09 | 1810 | 23.9 | 7.66 (2.00) |
| Uzbekistan | Autocracy | 0.07 | 1,250 | 34.7 | 6.71 (2.56) |
| Venezuela | Autocracy | 0.06 | 1,190 | 14.2 | 8.66 (1.80) |
| Nicaragua | Autocracy | 0.05 | 1,200 | 4.2 | 7.87 (2.79) |
| China | Autocracy | 0.04 | 3,036 | 65.4 | 6.49 (2.37) |
| Tajikistan | Autocracy | 0.04 | 1,200 | 20.6 | 5.62 (2.58) |
Country-level summary statistics.
Countries are ordered by Liberal Democracy Index (V-Dem). Regime Type is based on the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification: democracies include electoral and liberal democracies; autocracies include closed and electoral autocracies. N represents the number of WVS respondents from each country. Generalized Trust represents the percentage of respondents answering “most people can be trusted.” Perceived Corruption shows the mean and standard deviation on a 1–10 scale.
Figure 1 tests H1 by showing how country-level generalized trust varies with perceived corruption, separately for democracies and autocracies. In support of H1, the pattern strikingly differs between regime types. Among democracies, there is a strong negative relationship: countries with higher perceived corruption have substantially lower generalized trust. Among autocracies, this relationship is considerably weaker—replicating You's (2018) finding in more recent data and with a theory-driven operationalization of regime type based on the Regimes of the World classification. The alternative analysis using the continuous Liberal Democracy Index as a moderator of the effect of perceived corruption on generalized trust confirms this pattern: the country-level interaction between perceived corruption and liberal democracy is negative (B = −12.07, 95% CI [−22.36, −1.77], p = 0.022).
Figure 1
To test H2 and H3 we now turn to the multilevel analysis, which models how individuals’ corruption perceptions are associated with their trust while allowing this relationship to vary across countries. In support of H2, the main association between perceived corruption and generalized trust is negative (B = −0.12, 95% CI [−0.14, −0.11], p < 0.001). Thus, on average, individuals who perceive higher corruption exhibit lower generalized trust. Additionally, the main effect of liberal democracy is positive (B = 0.79, 95% CI [0.01, 1.56], p = 0.047), indicating that at average levels of perceived corruption, individuals in more democratic countries exhibit higher generalized trust.
In support of H3, the cross-level interaction between perceived corruption and liberal democracy is negative (B = −0.16, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.10], p < 0.001), indicating that the negative association between corruption perceptions and trust is stronger in more democratic countries. Figure 2 illustrates this pattern by plotting country-specific corruption-trust slopes against democratic quality. The slopes are extracted from a model without the cross-level interaction, showing the empirical variation that the interaction term captures. The blue line represents the predicted slope from the main model’s interaction term. Corruption slopes tend to be strongly negative in countries with high democratic quality while being close to zero in countries with low democratic quality.
Figure 2
To translate these results into substantive terms, we calculated predicted probabilities of expressing trust at different levels of corruption perception and democracy, illustrated in Figure 3. For a highly democratic country (90th percentile of the Liberal Democracy Index, the solid line in Figure 3), moving from low perceived corruption (4 on the 1–10 scale, which is the 10th percentile of observed values) to high perceived corruption (10 on the scale, 90th percentile) is associated with a decrease in the probability of trusting others from approximately 34 to 14%. The same change in corruption perception is associated with a much smaller decrease, from approximately 17 to 11% in a highly autocratic country (10th percentile of the Liberal Democracy Index, the dashed line in Figure 3).
Figure 3
We conducted several robustness checks. First, we added economic inequality (Gini coefficient) as a competing cross-level moderator. The democracy × corruption interaction remains essentially unchanged in this model (B = −0.16, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.1], p < 0.001). Similarly, when political polarization was added as a competing moderator, the democracy × corruption interaction remained robust B = −0.16, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.09], p < 0.001. Controlling for country-level social media use and internet penetration, our main finding also persisted (B = −0.18, 95% CI [−0.26, −0.11], p < 0.001).
Second, we tested whether alternative country-level characteristics could serve as moderators. Press freedom showed the same moderating effect to liberal democracy (B = −0.16, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.1], p < 0.001), consistent with its close conceptual and empirical overlap with democracy. Similarly using the Electoral Democracy Index instead of the Liberal Democracy Index, results remained unchanged (B = −0.16, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.1], p < 0.001). State resilience showed a weaker, though directionally consistent, moderating effect (B = −0.02, 95% CI [−0.03, −0.01], p = 0), suggesting that democratic institutions rather than state capacity drive the moderation.
Third, we conducted leave-one-out analyses, re-estimating the model 62 times, each time excluding one country. The cross-level interaction coefficient ranged from −0.17 to −0.15 across these analyses, with no single country driving the results.
This article provides systematic individual-level evidence that the corruption-trust association differs across regime types. Previous research documented this pattern at the aggregate level (You, 2018) but could not determine whether it reflected genuine differences in individual-level psychological processes or merely compositional effects. By measuring country-specific individual-level coefficients and showing they vary systematically with democratic quality, we provide evidence consistent with the view that regime type shapes how corruption perceptions relate to social trust.
Our findings suggest an asymmetry in how corruption relates to trust across regime types. In autocracies, the individual-level association between corruption perceptions and social distrust appears weak or absent, which may help explain how some autocratic regimes combine high corruption with relatively high generalized trust (Figure 1). In democracies, this association is substantially stronger. This pattern suggests that government quality in democracies may matter not merely for administrative efficiency or economic performance, but potentially for the social conditions that support democratic governance. Institutional integrity may affect the social trust that facilitates democratic cooperation—from voluntary tax compliance to electoral participation to civic engagement.
These findings speak to contemporary debates about democratic backsliding and resilience. They suggest that corruption scandals in established democracies should perhaps not be viewed merely as criminal justice matters or administrative failures, but as potential threats to social cohesion. This may help explain a puzzling feature of contemporary politics: why relatively minor corruption scandals can generate significant political crises in established democracies, while autocracies weather far more egregious corruption with limited social consequence. The difference may lie not in the severity of the corruption per se, but in how institutional frameworks shape how citizens interpret and respond to corruption.
Our results also have potential implications for anti-corruption efforts. Standard approaches focus on technical reforms: strengthening audit institutions, improving procurement transparency, raising civil servant salaries, and enhancing criminal enforcement. While these measures may reduce corruption levels, our findings suggest they may be insufficient to address the social consequences of corruption in democracies. If corruption perceptions are indeed associated with reduced social trust in democratic contexts, then anti-corruption strategies in democracies may need to be accompanied by efforts to rebuild and maintain social trust: swift, visible accountability when corruption is discovered; symbolic reaffirmation of democratic equality norms; and frank public discourse about how corruption relates to democratic values.
These findings also suggest that government communication about transparency and anti-corruption efforts may matter for social trust. Because perceptions of corruption, and not merely actual corruption, appear to drive the trust erosion we document, proactive communication about institutional integrity may be valuable. Democratic governments could invest in publicizing accountability measures, successful prosecutions of corrupt officials, and ongoing institutional reforms. Such communication campaigns would not substitute for substantive anti-corruption work but could complement it by ensuring that citizens are aware of their government’s commitment to impartiality. This may be especially important in democracies, where our findings suggest that trust is particularly sensitive to perceived corruption.
More broadly, these findings contribute to understanding potential micro-foundations of regime stability. While much scholarship focuses on how institutions shape elite behavior, our results suggest that institutions may also shape mass psychology in ways relevant for regime dynamics. Democratic institutions may create citizens whose social trust is more responsive to perceived institutional failure than citizens in autocracies.
We acknowledge several limitations of this study. First, and most importantly, we theorize but do not directly test the specific mechanisms we propose—normative amplification and representative contagion. Our data show that the corruption-trust association varies by regime type, but we cannot observe the psychological processes that produce this variation. Future experimental research could directly manipulate normative frames (e.g., presenting corruption as violating equality norms versus as typical elite behavior) and representative connection (e.g., emphasizing that officials were elected by citizens versus appointed by elites) to test whether these factors moderate how corruption information affects trust. Survey research could also measure perceived norm violation and representative identification as mediators. Until such studies are conducted, our mechanistic account remains theoretical.
Second, our cross-sectional individual-level data cannot establish the causal direction from corruption perceptions to trust. The association we observe is consistent with corruption perceptions reducing trust, but reverse causality is also plausible: individuals with generally low trust may be more inclined to perceive corruption. For evidence supporting the corruption-to-trust direction, we rely on the experimental literature (Rothstein and Eek, 2009; Martinangeli et al., 2024), which demonstrates that exposure to information about corruption causally reduces generalized trust. Our contribution is to show that this association varies systematically by regime type, but we cannot rule out that regime type also moderates reverse-causal processes.
Third, our cross-sectional design cannot capture within-country change over time. Longitudinal analysis tracking how the within-country corruption-trust relationship shifts after prolonged democratization or backsliding would provide stronger evidence for our theoretical account. Fourth, we focus on liberal democracy as the primary moderator, and do not examine the separate roles of different institutional features such as judicial independence, press freedom, and electoral integrity. These features are highly correlated in our data, making it difficult to isolate their independent contributions.
Ultimately, our findings point to a potential fragility in democracies. If democracy is built on a social contract that requires mutual trust among citizens, and if corruption perceptions undermine that trust more strongly in democratic contexts, then democracies may face a vulnerability that autocracies do not. When citizens perceive corruption, they may lose faith not only in their leaders but also in each other. As democracies worldwide face challenges from polarization, populism, and institutional decay, understanding how institutional context shapes the social consequences of corruption may be important for preserving democratic resilience.
Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. Data, codebook, and replication instructions are available at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/A8M4R.
KE: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft. IV: Data curation, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing – review & editing.
The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. Support for this research was provided by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (grant no. 2022.0191).
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The author(s) declared that Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The authors made use of the large language model Claude Sonnet 4.5 to assist with the drafting of this article. The model was accessed from claude.ai and used without modification on 1–9 December, 2025.
Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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Keywords
accountability, corruption, democratic resilience, regime type, social trust
Citation
Eriksson K and Vartanova I (2026) The price of accountability: corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies. Front. Polit. Sci. 8:1779810. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1779810
Received
02 January 2026
Revised
21 January 2026
Accepted
06 February 2026
Published
02 March 2026
Volume
8 - 2026
Edited by
Bill Gelfeld, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
Reviewed by
Alberto Mirisola, University of Palermo, Italy
Florian Cafiero, UMR8598 Groupe d'étude des méthodes de l'analyse sociologique de la Sorbonne (GEMASS), France
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Eriksson and Vartanova.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*****Correspondence: Kimmo Eriksson, kimmo.eriksson@mdu.se
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Rule of law doesn’t address the problem of bad laws (from bad governance).
Being able to rely on being able to enforce contracts means you need less trust in people you do business with.
Same idea here except that it happens under the table. Elected officials usually get a fixed pay, and often, it is not that high compared to the importance of their work. What Paulo Maluf is proposing is essentially "I am going to pay myself well (through corruption), but I will do what's best for the city".
Copying the visible behavior but not doing the actual part that matters.
Also incredibly common in corporate.
Funny that you take London as an example of Western Europe's low-trust environment, entirely ignoring the fact that the population of London can hardly be called Western European anymore. According to [1] in 2021 only 36,8% of the London population was White British, trend decreasing.
> But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust.
Maybe because the population actually working and doing business is still Western European? But that won't last long if current trends and policies continue.
this incentive exists with or without corruption
Societies have very different opinions which kinds of corruption are perfectly fine, and which kinds are criminal.
Is that not the definition of corruption?
Totally unthinkable in the UK ( at least outside organised crime ).
I know from my own personal experience that I haven't paid a bribe to a cop or to an alderman to get a zoning variance. There are some places where this kind of thing is routine. (e.g. I know there is a crooked cop somewhere but I also believe that if I tried to pay a bribe to a cop it wouldn't go well)
Thus I trust people's reports of street level corruption.
If it comes to perceptions of "corruption in high places" that is mediated by the media. It may well be that it is very corrupt and you never hear about it, or that it squeaky clean but you hear allegations 10 times a day. Or a Democrat might think everything is corrupt when Republicans are in power and then when Democrats are in power, Republicans take up the slack.
So I don't trust people's reports of corruption in high places.
Now I know a lot of people who are involved in road construction and maintenance in upstate NY who range from "drives a truck" to "manages $10M+ projects" and the belief that there is corruption in highway projects is widespread based on second- and third- hand accounts.
2. In a relatively severe, but consistent regime, the high penalties for violating trust in everyday cases (crime) act as a deterrent.
3. Fear may cause people to be selective and mindful about their social associations based on stronger proofs of trustworthiness. You might tell a Hitler joke to someone you have used more energy/caution to "vet", but avoid being too casual in environments of undetermined trustworthiness.
The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem.
You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf.
Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is stealing access to them. That's corruption.
The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer is officially supposed to being doing something else as part of their job. If so, that's possible because people learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look the other way for them.
And in a society where everything works this way, what do you think happens to overall economic productivity? Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the ability to get things through the blat network even more valuable!
But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.
When a population immigrates, they change the social structure of the land they immigrate to to be similar to the culture they came from. This is why London, New York, and other cities are becoming exactly the types of places that the Welcome Refugees people thought they were saving people from. Turns out that places aren't rotten, the people populating them are.
without corruption you could do a shitty job once and then you won’t get another contract because you did a shit job
with corruption the quality of the work won’t matter so in the extreme case you can deliver nothing at all and you’ll still keep getting contracts - In my country we call this being “plugged in”
The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.
I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.
If you want to make that argument, you'd at least need to look at the proportion of the population that's Western European, not just British.
Is there a source for this or is more of a vibes thing?
If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.
I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is rationing these items, it creates a black market based on personal connections. In Western society nobody cares because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can just buy from someone else.
That action is basically stochastic theft from the grocery store, because you've altered the pricing of a possibly scarce good.
What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules do you expect someone else to break for the return favor? What rules might they later expect you to break? To what extent do you stop seeing the rules of external society as rules that you're supposed to follow?
It starts as favors.
By the time you're stealing from your employer, it's blat.
By the time you're recruiting one friend to submit paperwork to help another friend commit insurance fraud, it's still blat. But also its starting to look like something else.
Once you owe a favor to a Mafia Don, it's called organized crime. But the underlying blat is still recognizable.
But it's not true , or only half true 30 years ago. I personally know 3 or 4 of my alumina abandoned their expertise of Optical Engineering to pursue Lawyer career 20 years ago and made big money.
Another example is one of celebrity law professor (not lawyer though) who recently got involved in a controversy because of Epstein file. He shut down his “weibo" (a Chinese Twitter ) account. He also made tons of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Xiang
China moves very fast compare to the western society. Something true today might not be true 3 years later. Let alone half-truth 30 years ago.
So I would caveat it as if you are a really good strong student in China, it would seem that you are much more likely to go into Engineering, Business, or Join the CCP. Its not an A student type of career, more of a B or C student.
Also, investing into military tech prevents war on your territory, which is, well, highly disruptive.
They definitely supported a lot of their rocket science from found documentation in Peenemünde et. al. (The personnel OTOH did its best not to fall into Soviet hands, and most of them ended in America, even though some didn't make it and were captured by the Soviets.)
They had genuine excellency in mathematics and theoretical physics. First, those specializations didn't require much expensive or advanced equipment back then. Second, by their very nature, they were freer from ideological bullshit than other specializations, and that alone attracted many of the best and brightest there.
(I can confirm that even in late-stage Communist Czechoslovakia, very hard sciences were considered an intellectual haven for non-conformists. The ideologues didn't understand them and did not consider them subversive per se.)
On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
Until today, you will find ex-Soviet textbooks of maths and physics all over the net, and people actually download them and use them to study. That does not apply in most other domains.
The page I linked shows 53,8% white in 2021. Even if you count the majority of whites as West Europeans (and not East Europeans), they were under 50% in 2021, probably even less today.
If you have more accurate and up to date data, please share.
But that misses the point. I don't say London is not high-trust because of the non-Western population. I say London is not a western city anymore because of its population.
I have no fire department where I live, nor really any effective police. We don't have public infrastructure nor public roads or anything like that. People here do not use public services and our taxes aren't high enough to pay for them, they are almost $0. We do have zoning and codes, but that's sustainable only because it's funded by enforcement fines, otherwise you're on your own.
That said, there were contextual clues. If you go back, I said, "You get what you need through corruption..." The next reply was agreeing and expanding on that. This strongly suggests that each step in the description involves corruption in some way.
That said, hopefully you're now clear that these blat networks involve pervasive corruption.
When a community that is used to blat networks moves to a different country, the blat network doesn't go away. Throughout US history, it has been common to see blat networks in immigrant communities turn into straight up organized crime. The most famous example being the rise of the Mafia. But it is hardly an isolated example.
But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail employees reserving cheese for someone who can return favors, that particular thing is particular to a socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic goods.
This holds for "pure" biology. On the other hand, for medicine, in the East Block phage therapy was intensively developed (which in the West was barely done; instead in the Western countries there was an intense development of antibiotics).
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_therapy&old...
"In the Soviet Union, extensive research and development soon began in this field. [...] Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Soviet scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases, such as dysentery and gangrene. Soviet researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world."
Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend upon.
Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things. Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.
Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable - people know what to expect. Democracies change periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good example of what happens when a government fails to maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing economy.
London has been a city of traders and other foreigners since at least the days of the Romans.
Unlike with Lysenko, where shortages of food for the regular population never demonstrated themselves on the nomenklatura's own dinner tables, there was some feedback mechanism that could not be ignored.
But I agree that the exact border between biology and medical science is murky.
The dominant culture of the local population is not "Western" anymore.
> London has been a city of traders and other foreigners since at least the days of the Romans.
Is it?
Let's look at the official data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London
Percentage of white population in London over the years:
- 1961 - 97,7%
- 1966 - 95,5%
- 1971 - 92,6%
- 1981 - 86,6%
- 1991 - 79,8%
- 2001 - 71,15%
- 2011 - 59,79%
- 2021 - 53,8%
It's clear that, up until very recently, London was a city of traders and other foreigners living there among the highly homogenous local population.