An evaluation of government as trustworthy reflects the judgment that authorities are motivated to fulfill their promises and do what is right for the societies they serve. When citizens conflate liking a leader with assessments of trustworthiness, their trust of leaders will be driven, in part, by leaders’ popularity. Survey evidence from the U.S. suggests trust in national government often reflects shifts in presidential popularity (Levi and Stoker, 2000). Charisma has often proved a basis for citizens’ evaluations of the trustworthiness of leaders, some of whom are trustworthy and others of whom are not. Identifying what drives a leader’s decisions or when or how her personal motives have changed is extremely difficult. Thus, the best objective measure of the trustworthiness of the motivations of government leaders is citizens’ assessment of the quality of institutions in which political authorities are embedded. In countries where citizens assess institutions as effectively selecting and constraining government personnel and as delivering the services they need, citizens’ evaluations of personal motivations are less important than their judgment that the institutions work (Hardin, 2002; Levi, 1988).

When citizens are confident that government has the competence to produce promised services, they are more likely to see government agents as trustworthy. A government’s administrative competence has two attributes: honesty, and the capacity to implement rules and regulations. Citizens are more likely to view government agents as trustworthy when they perceive that government can ensure that revenues will produce the services they expect and government promises. High levels of corruption can undermine this perception, particularly when the corruption takes the form of elected officials and government agents pocketing the revenues rather than spending them on public goods. Corruption reduces the resources government can spend on the poor through social programs and transfers resources generally from the poor to the wealthy (Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005; Tanzi, 1998). Corrupt governments are also left with less money to spend on public officials’ salaries creating incentives for government agents to accept bribes and prey upon citizens rather than serve them (Bates, 2001, 2008 _b_ ). Patronage or other factors that undermine the meritocratic selection of government agents may erode citizen confidence, particularly if the officeholders are poor at their jobs or if the effect is to reduce agents’ incentives to implement the law among certain segments of the population (Brewer, 1989; Seligson, 2002). By establishing meritocratic mechanisms for the selection and retention of qualified officials, bureaucracies reduce predatory activities and increase the capacity of bureaucracies to implement social policies that benefit a large portion of the population. States with competent and honest bureaucracies are better able to implement their government’s objectives and, should they choose, provide higher levels of goods provision (Ziblatt, 2008).

According to Weber (1968, p. 905), the purpose of a state is to provide citizens with collective goods including: the enactment of law; the protection of personal safety and public order; the cultivation of hygiene, social welfare and cultural interests; and, the organized armed protection against outside attack. Theories of state-building emphasize that citizens direct their loyalty to the level of government that is providing them with welfare-enhancing goods (Barkey, 1994; Hechter, 2000). State-building and the expansion of direct rule in 4