Abstract This article explores the relationship between economic growth and trust in government using variation in GDP growth experienced over a lifetime since birth. We assemble a newly harmonized global data set across 11 major opinion surveys, comprising 3.3 million respondents in 166 countries since 1990. Exploiting cohort-level variation, we find that people who have experienced higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments, with larger effects found in democracies. Higher-growth experiences are also associated with improved perceptions of government performance and living standards. We find no similar channel between growth experience and interpersonal trust. Second, more recent growth experiences appear to matter most for trust in government, with no detectable effect of growth experienced during one’s formative years, closer to birth, or before birth. Third, we find evidence of a “trust paradox” whereby average trust in government is lower in democracies than in autocracies. Our results are robust to a range of falsification exercises, robustness checks, and single-country evidence using the American National Election Studies and the Swiss Household Panel.

We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in 7 parties, 290 municipalities, and 10 elections (for the period 1982–2014). We ask how competence was affected by a zipper quota, requiring local parties to alternate men and women on the ballot, implemented by the Social Democratic Party in 1993. Far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians where it raised female representation the most. We argue that resignation of mediocre male leaders was a key driver of this effect. (JEL D72, J16)