Chang, Eric, with Yun-han Chu. “Corruption and Trust: Exceptionalism in Asian Democracies?” Forthcoming in Journal of Politics.

 

Abstract

While voluminous studies have attributed the continuing decline of institutional trust to political corruption, the link between corruption and institutional trust in East Asia has yet to receive the attention it merits in empirical research. This paper fills this gap: Making use of newly compiled data from the East Asia Barometer, we find a strong trust-eroding effect of political corruption in East Asian democracies. This effect holds uniformly across all countries examined in this study, and remains robust even after taking into account the endogenous relationship between corruption and trust. We also find no evidence that contextual factors lessen the corruption-trust link in East Asia.