Explaining Trust in Legal Institutions: the Myth of Postcommunist Exceptionalism

Significant attention has been paid to the "trust deficit" in the former communist states of Eastern Europe, suggesting that individual and aggregate patterns of trust differ across the European east/west divide. Using ten years of pan-European survey data data, this paper calls into question the idea that individual-level demographic characteristics of citizens in the postcommunist countries are associated differently with trust when compared to their Western European counterparts. Similarly, individual responses to national-level institutional and economic realities show a clear pattern across Europe, suggesting that the key differences with regards to aggregate levels of trust are based on poorly performing institutions in much of the postcommunist world.