Toward a Cooperative Social World: An Integrative Study of International Institutional Trust

Bringing together the knowledge-, identity-, and morality-based accounts of trust, this article proposes a multilevel framework where all variants of interpersonal/institutional trust are factorially distinct yet collectively subsumed by a moralistic propensity to trust. As such, trust has both object-general and object-specific properties. With the integrated theorizing on trust, I attempt to uncover the causes and consequences of generalized trust toward international institutions, namely, international institutional trust. Specifically, I argue that international institutional trust is derived from a combination of outward exposure (knowledge-based), transnational identity (identity-based), and belief in human goodness (morality-based). Besides, people’s general orientations toward international institutions spill over and shape their more concrete views about world affairs. Individuals high in international institutional trust are expected to hold more favorable attitudes toward immigration and foreign nations. More importantly, given cross-national variability, such spillover effects are moderated by a country’s degree of openness to the international community. While the effects of international institutional trust become stronger in countries with low and high levels of openness, they decrease in countries with middle levels of openness, resulting in a U-shaped pattern. Analyses of the AsiaBarometer Survey and the World Values Survey lend empirical support to the above arguments.