Institutional trust in Ghana between corruption experienced-based and corruption perception-based dimensions

Citizens’ trust in public institutions, institutional trust, is essential in the governance of a modern state since it enables citizens to accept government authority and supports the legitimacy, effective functioning, and stability of democratic systems. Hence, understanding the determinants of institutional trust matters, particularly in developing economies. Corruption perception as well as experience may have devastating effects on institutional trust as they disseminate the conviction that public goods are not managed fairly and erodes values of social justice, institutional accountability, and transparency, particularly in new democratic contexts. We embrace the quality of government institution perspective, and we investigate whether institutional trust is influenced by citizens’ experience as well as their perception of corruption in the context of Ghana. This perspective claims the existence of an implicit non-written contract, i.e. social contract, between citizens and public institutions based on reciprocal and mutual support (Rothstein 2005; 2021). Accordingly, citizens support the state by complying with the rule of law and by contributing to the public good endowment as taxpayers, and in exchange, government institutions are committed to provide the public goods, the welfare services, and to administer the legal justice according to principles of fairness, transparency, and impartiality (Rothstein and Teorell 2008). This mutual agreement relies upon citizens’ trust that the government institutions will satisfy the terms and conditions of this contract. Where government institutions breach the social contract due to the spread of malpractices, trust is eroded and, hence, this mutual agreement is deteriorated with all the subsequent consequences in terms of legitimacy, governance, and socio-economic stability. Corruption is a clear example of this malpractice and a key obstacle for the establishment and the sustainability of this social contract (Rothstein 2021). Ghana, in this respect, is an ideal context of analysis as since 2015 the three arms of government, executive/presidency, legislature and judiciary, have been mired in corruption exposes and allegations. Given that key institutions have been implicated in the near daily reports, exposes and allegations of corruption, this begs the question as to which extent the incessant linking of these institutions in corruption reports affects citizens’ trust. Using data from the seventh round of Afrobarometer surveys, we find that both corruption perception-based and experience-based are negative predictors of institutional trust. Interestingly, the magnitude of the corruption perception-based coefficient is nearly twice as much as that of the corruption experience-based. Additionally, whilst institutional trust decreases with corruption perception regardless of an individual’s experience of corruption, this negative association is steeper among individuals with lower experience of corruption. These preliminary findings seem to be consistent to additional sensitivity analysis including extensive supporting model specifications. We argue that these outcomes enrich the important discussion embraced in institutional studies regarding the relationship between individuals’ beliefs about corruption and the design of more effective anti-corruption reforms.