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Corruption and Trust: Exceptionalism in Asian Democracies?

While voluminous studies have attributed the continuing decline of institutional trust to political corruption, the link between corruption and institutional trust in Asia has yet to be explored systematically. Testing the effect of corruption on institutional trust is theoretically important and empirically challenging, since many suggest that contextual factors in Asia, such as political culture and electoral politics, might neutralize the negative impact of corruption. Utilizing data from the East Asia Barometer, we find a strong trust-eroding effect of political corruption in Asian democracies. We also find no evidence that contextual factors lessen the corruption-trust link in Asia. The trust-eroding effect holds uniformly across all countries examined in this study and remains robust even after taking into account the endogenous relationship between corruption and trust.