Crime and trust in institutions: evidence from India

ABSTRACT

The article presents empirical evidence on the impact of crime on household’s trust in institutions in India. Employing fixed effect panel regressions, the study finds that crime victimization significantly undermines trust in major public bodies, including politicians, justice-related institutions and governments. The study also documents a negative spillover effect of local crimes on public perception of institutions. Such crime-led distrust can cause persistence of weak institutions through curtailing reporting of crimes as well as support for democracy. Combating crime is thus crucial to restore citizen’s trust in institutions and enhance the quality of governance in India.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• trust
• institutions
• India

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C23
• K42

Acknowledgement

I thank Professor Ishita Mukhopadhyay, Dr. Sukanta Bhattacharya and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ IHDS asks how often unmarried girls are harassed in the village/neighbourhood. Responses are ordered categorical, ranging from 1 (never/rare) to 3 (often).

² Local governments include ‘Village Panchayats’ and ‘Nagarpalikas’.

³ All fixed effect binary logit models use ‘high/low’ as the cut-off- point.

⁴ (see Table A1 in Appendix)

⁵ Note that the present study uses fixed effect ordered logit model which addresses the issue of endogeneity in more rigorous way.