Linking trust, performance, and governance quality: what can explain the incongruity?

ABSTRACT

Country-representative surveys indicate that several countries have higher institutional trust despite lower institutional performance and weak governance. To understand this puzzle, the current study explores the role of people's degree of assertiveness (low vs high) in determining institutional trust in 32 African countries and finds that less assertive people have higher institutional trust. The study also finds that people with lower assertiveness tend to believe there are less governance-related problems; for example, less corruption. Further, people with lower assertiveness rate the performance of their government more highly when evaluating indicators such as ‘management of economy’ and ‘reduction of crime’.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality of governance
• performance
• trust
• corruption
• personality
• Africa
• assertive values

Acknowledgment

The research was conducted when the author was a PhD research fellow at the Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Norway under a Norwegian Government's scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The HDI is a measure ‘of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living’ (UNDP, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

There is no specific funding to conduct this research.