Economic crimes and trust toward political institutions: evidence from online fraud victimization and related policy interventions in Italy

In the last decades, increasing attention has been devoted, both in the academic and political arena, to understand the determinants of distrust in political institutions and to identify actions that can be put into place to restore this peculiar form of social capital. Using data from a representative survey of the Italian population over the 2013–2021 period, this paper focuses on the role exerted by a specific form of economic crime – namely online fraud – to weaken political trust. The findings indicate a strong and statistically significant negative association between victimization by online fraud and trust in various political institutions. This relationship remains robust across multiple checks, including Oster’s (2019) sensitivity test for unobserved confounding factors. The analysis further suggests that policy interventions aimed at reducing the risk of online fraud may also serve, instrumentally, to rebuild confidence in political institutions.