Background

Wave 7 of the World Values Survey was conducted in 2017-2021. Among many measures, the survey included two measures of interest to this project:

1. Confidence in institutions. The asked about trust in a wide variety of institutions. Here, we focus on trust in the three main branches of governments: The executive branch (“The government”), the judicial branch (“The courts”), and the legislative branch (“Parliament”). We take the mean score of the three confidence ratings (alpha = 0.82)

2. Support for radical change. Participants were asked to select the statement that best describes their opinion: (1) The entire way our society is organized must be radically changed by revolutionary action; (2) Our society must be gradually improved by reforms; or (3) Our present society must be valiantly defended against all subversive forces. We dummy-coded this variable so that each response gets a 0 or 1, depending on response. We will look at the likelihood of selecting option 1 as the main DV, but we will also verify this with separate models predicting the other two options.

3. Control variables. We have individual-level controls and country-level controls. On the individual level, we control for participants’ ideology, urban/rural, sex, age, education, and income (on a within-country income scale). On the country-level, we control for GDP per capita.

Descriptives

Total N and total missing values for each country

missing values for our two variables of interest: Confidence in institutions and support for radical change.

country N_eligible N_missing
AND 959 45
ARG 995 8
ARM 1175 48
AUL 1755 58
BNG 1178 22
BOL 2004 63
BRA 1631 131
CAN 4018 0
CHL 950 50
CHN 3003 33
COL 1520 0
CYP 925 75
CZR 1164 36
DRV 1188 12
ECU 1177 23
EGY 959 241
ETH 1198 32
GMY 1472 56
GRC 1146 54
GUA 1229 0
HKG 2036 39
INS 3170 30
IRN 1476 23
IRQ 1192 8
JOR 1180 23
JPN 1066 287
KEN 1242 24
KYR 1154 46
KZK 1091 185
LEB 1191 9
LIB 1154 42
MAD 1030 9
MAL 1312 1
MAU 1012 11
MEX 1708 33
MNG 1604 34
MOR 1200 0
MYA 1200 0
NEW 977 80
NIC 1141 59
NIG 1214 23
NIRL 433 14
NTH 1650 495
PAK 1945 50
PER 1366 34
PHI 1196 4
PRI 1068 59
ROK 1245 0
ROM 1165 92
RUS 1654 156
SIN 1801 211
SLO 1158 42
SRB 946 100
TAJ 1188 12
TAW 1212 11
THI 1343 157
TUN 1183 25
TUR 2336 79
UKG 2490 119
UKR 1177 112
URU 969 31
USA 2552 44
VEN 1190 0
ZIM 1207 8

Great, that leaves us with a total of 90470 eligible participants over 64 countries.

Demographics

I’ll look only at eligible participants here (I’ll check later if the missing data is missing at random or if it impacts our analyses)

Sex

sex N perc
female 47413 52.41
male 42976 47.50
no answer 81 0.09

Age

age_mean age_sd
43.28238 16.52272

Education

Education descriptions vary by country, so to standardize, they went with the ISCED (https://datatopics.worldbank.org/education/wRsc/classification) definitions from the world bank:
0. Early childhood education; 1. Primary education; 2. Lower secondary education; 3. Upper secondary education; 4. Post-secondary non-tertiary education; 5. Short-cycle tertiary education; 6. Bachelor or equivalent; 7. Master or equivalent; 8. Doctoral or equivalent.

Income

Respondents’ income was just measured as a 1-10 scale (each point is an “income group in your country”).

Rural/Urban

region N perc
rural 28396 31.39
urban 62047 68.58
no data 27 0.03

Variables of interest

Confidence in institutions

Respondents were asked to indicate their confidence in several organizations on a 1 (A great deal to 4 (None at all) scale. I later reverse-scored for ease of interpretability. The three organizations we are looking at represent the three branches of government: Justice System/Courts (the judicial branch), the Government (the executive branch), and Parliament (the legislative branch).

Support for change

Respondents were asked to choose which of the following best describes their opinion:
1. The entire way our society is organized must be radically changed by revolutionary action.
2. Our society must be gradually improved by reforms.
3. Our present society must be valiantly defended against all subversive forces.

Analysis

To analyze this, I will follow the script used by Wiwad et al. (2020; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0835-8; https://osf.io/s8f7r/).

My primary outcome variable is the dummy-coded support for radical change (0 and 1). My primary predictor is the composite score of confidence in institutions.

Modeling

First step in running an MLM is determining whether or not it’s actually necessary. Here is the null model:

(#tab:unnamed-chunk-11)
**
Term \(\hat{\beta}\) 95% CI \(t\) \(\mathit{df}\) \(p\)
Intercept 0.19 [0.17, 0.21] 17.80 91,086 < .001

Calculating the ICC based on the output of the null model:


ICC = 0.046

While the effect of the clustering is small, the data set is large so this is enough to bias the model output. So, moving forward with the MLM. First the predictor only model.

(#tab:unnamed-chunk-13)
**
Term \(\hat{\beta}\) 95% CI \(t\) \(\mathit{df}\) \(p\)
Intercept 0.27 [0.24, 0.29] 23.86 90,405 < .001
Conf inst -0.03 [-0.04, -0.03] -18.60 90,405 < .001


And now the full model with all Level 1 covariates.

(#tab:unnamed-chunk-14)
**
Term \(\hat{\beta}\) 95% CI \(t\) \(\mathit{df}\) \(p\)
Intercept 0.40 [0.37, 0.43] 28.81 64,162 < .001
Conf inst -0.03 [-0.04, -0.03] -15.41 64,162 < .001
Ideo -0.01 [-0.01, 0.00] -8.35 64,162 < .001
Sexmale 0.02 [0.01, 0.02] 5.14 64,162 < .001
Age 0.00 [0.00, 0.00] -19.95 64,162 < .001
Edu -0.01 [-0.01, 0.00] -6.53 64,162 < .001
Income 0.00 [0.00, 0.00] -1.68 64,162 .092
Urban 0.00 [-0.01, 0.00] -0.68 64,162 .496


Note that this cut our sample by ~30,000 people due to all of the missing values. I’ll run robustness checks with imputation of missing values to see if these and the following effects hold.

And now the full model with all Level 1 and level 2 covariates.

(#tab:unnamed-chunk-15)
**
Term \(\hat{\beta}\) 95% CI \(t\) \(\mathit{df}\) \(p\)
Intercept 0.45 [0.41, 0.48] 25.57 62,651 < .001
Conf inst -0.03 [-0.04, -0.03] -14.97 62,651 < .001
Ideo -0.01 [-0.01, 0.00] -8.21 62,651 < .001
Sexmale 0.02 [0.01, 0.02] 5.00 62,651 < .001
Age 0.00 [0.00, 0.00] -19.67 62,651 < .001
Edu -0.01 [-0.01, 0.00] -6.13 62,651 < .001
Income 0.00 [0.00, 0.00] -1.70 62,651 .089
Urban 0.00 [-0.01, 0.00] -0.69 62,651 .492
Gdppc 0.00 [0.00, 0.00] -3.64 49 .001

Only the US

(#tab:unnamed-chunk-16)
**
Predictor \(b\) 95% CI \(t\) \(\mathit{df}\) \(p\)
Intercept 0.66 [0.57, 0.74] 15.34 2462 < .001
Conf inst -0.10 [-0.12, -0.07] -7.93 2462 < .001
Ideo 0.00 [-0.01, 0.01] 0.16 2462 .871
Sexmale 0.00 [-0.03, 0.03] 0.19 2462 .847
Age 0.00 [0.00, 0.00] -7.85 2462 < .001
Edu -0.02 [-0.03, -0.01] -4.44 2462 < .001
Income -0.01 [-0.02, 0.00] -2.79 2462 .005
Urban 0.00 [-0.04, 0.04] -0.10 2462 .924

Plot

The red line represents the effect of confidence in institutions on support for radical change, adjusting for all the covariates (level 1 and level 2) in the model.