Trust in civil servants is essential for effective governance, enabling policy implementation, public service delivery, and compliance. However, the lack of comparable cross-national data on trust in bureaucracy has limited our ability to systematically examine these relationships. To address this gap, we develop the Trust in Civil Servants (TCS) dataset with an advanced latent-variable modeling technique, using 123 national and cross-national surveys from 98 countries and territories (1986–2022). Our measures reveal variations in trust both within and between countries and territories.
Do personalist leaders erode public trust in democracy, or are they a symptom of its decline? The election of personalist leaders—whose party cannot effectively check them—and the declining public trust in democracy are often cited as evidence for democratic backsliding. But we lack a theoretical understanding of their dynamics, nor did we have empirical data to examine their relationship globally. This paper, using two novel global datasets based on latent response model, is the first to investigate the causal relations between personalist leaders and public trust in democracy in a long panel of cross-national data.