Corruption Exposure, Political Trust, and Immigrants

Scholars and politicians have expressed concern that immigrants from countries with low levels of political trust transfer those attitudes to their destination countries. Using large-scale survey data covering 38 countries and exploiting origin-country variation across different cohorts and surveys, we show that, to the contrary, immigrants more exposed to institutional corruption before migrating exhibit higher levels of political trust in their new country. Higher trust is observed for national political institutions only and does not carry over to other supra-national institutions and individuals. We report evidence that higher levels of political trust among immigrants persist, leading to greater electoral participation and political engagement in the long run. The impact of home-country corruption on political trust in the destination country is further amplified by large differences in levels of income and democracy between home and host countries, which serve to highlight the contrast in the two settings. It is lessened by exposure to media, a source of independent information about institutional quality. Finally, our extensive analyses indicate that self-selection into host countries based on trust is highly unlikely and the results also hold when focusing only on forced migrants who were unlikely to have been subject to selection.