The Denial of Governance Failure in High-Trust Democracies

📅 Publication Date

2025-07-20

📝 Description

This dataset and accompanying Python notebook support the empirical analysis for the study "The Denial of Governance Failure in High-Trust Democracies". The project investigates how interpersonal trust and informal social norms interact with perceptions of institutional legitimacy and income distribution, using large-scale survey data.

The core research question: Do trust-based informal norms mask or reinforce corruption-like mechanisms in high-trust democracies through preferential behavior?

Included Files:

• Controls.xlsx – Demographic and background controls

• Core.xlsx – Variables on trust, fairness, helpfulness, and informal norms

• Institutional.xlsx – Institutional trust and confidence indicators

• Polis.ipynb – Google Colab–ready Python notebook containing full data processing and regression analysis pipeline (OLS with robust and clustered SEs, VIF checks, and visualization).

📂 How to Use in Google Colab

1. Open Google Colab: https://colab.research.google.com

2. Upload Files:

   • Click the folder icon (📁) in the left sidebar

   • Click the upload icon and add the 4 files: Controls.xlsx, Core.xlsx, Institutional.xlsx, Polis.ipynb

3. Open the Notebook:

   • Double-click Polis.ipynb in the file browser to open it

4. Run the Notebook:

   • Follow the step-by-step cells, which load data, clean it, run regressions, compute VIFs, and produce tables and plots

   • You may modify file paths if needed:
     Replace '/content/Controls.xlsx' with the corresponding uploaded path if you mount Google Drive instead

5. Requirements: The notebook auto-installs required packages:

   !pip install pandas statsmodels openpyxl
   

🧾 License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Copyright (C) 2025 The Authors.

🏷️ Keywords

Social capital, corruption, trust, governance, informal norms, OLS regression, high-trust democracies, GSS, inequality, institutional confidence

🌐 Languages

English

🧪 Programming Language

Python 3.11
Notebook-compatible with Google Colab and Jupyter

🏗️ Version

v1.0.0

📦 Publisher

Zenodo

📘 Funding

This research received no specific grant but draws on publicly available survey data.