Citizens Trust in Political institutions in Ghana: Do Legitimacy and Social Capital matter?

Abstract

The study adopts cultural and institutional or performance-based theories to examine the impact of social capital and legitimacy variables on citizens’ trust in their political institutions. The dependent variable was classified into central level institutions and local level institutions. The study included two cultural variables which are generalized trust and associationism based on Putnam’s (1993) approach to social capital. Similarly, the study included three performance variables which are input legitimacy, throughput legitimacy, and output legitimacy based on Schmidt (2013) approach to legitimacy. The thesis was based on a multivariate analysis, developing six regression models on a sample size of 2400 respondents from the Round 8 (2019) of the Afrobarometer datasets. The findings of the study suggest that despite high perceived levels of corruption among the central level institutions, citizens’ trust in them are higher than local level institutions. Moreover, the results of the study revealed that on the aspect of social capital, both generalized trust and associationism had positive significant effects on the dependent variable. Additionally, on the aspect of legitimacy, both input legitimacy and output legitimacy variables had positive significant effects on the dependent variable, whereas the effect of throughput legitimacy variables were insignificant.