Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

Abstract

**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.

1 Introduction

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.

2 Theoretical framework

2.1 Social trust and its political foundations

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).

2.2 The moderating role of democratic institutions

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 au