Why don’t citizens trust the government

In two recent reports, RAU has looked at the issues around political trust, trustworthiness, social capital and political participation.

We carried out two different exercises. The first was to examine political trust over time, with the notion that political trust (and trustworthiness) should be sensitive to the political and economic context at any one time.

The second was to examine in the most recent data, Round 7 (2017) of Afrobarometer, the relationships between all the variables of the political trust, social trust, social capital, etc. We did this in order to understand the more subtle relationships involved in the approval and support of the government.