ABSTRACT
Central to the stability of a regime is that citizens trust a nation's institutional framework. Based on this premise, this article looks at how much Eastern and Western Germans trust several institutions of Germany's political system. More generally, it examines the empirical validity of three potential individual-level sources of institutional trust: (1) citizens’ ideological values (a value model); (2) publics’ appraisals of the economic performance of institutions (a performance model); (3) citizens’ ties to other individuals (a social capital model). We find that institutional trust is quite low, especially in the East. We also show that institutional trust is significantly driven by all three factors.
