The geopolitics of civic honesty: trust, mafia influence and state resilience

A new article published in the Journal of Social Issues explores how the interplay between political institutions and criminal organizations shapes civic honesty across the globe. Titled The Geopolitics of Civic Honesty: The Role of Interpersonal and Political Trust Amid Varying Degrees of Mafia Influence and State Resilience, the study brings together data from 132,602 respondents across 84 countries to examine how trust relates to citizens’ commitment to the public good in contexts where state authority may be challenged by organized crime.

The research highlights the importance of two structural conditions: the degree of criminal groups’ influence and the resilience of the state. The authors show that vertical trust (confidence in institutions) supports civic honesty in environments with strong state capacity and limited criminal governance. Yet, where criminal groups are more influential and state resilience is weak, the pattern reverses: trust in institutions correlates with lower civic honesty, reflecting how institutional confidence may translate into support for corrupt systems. Horizontal trust (trust in other people) also showed a conditional effect, predicting lower civic honesty in fragile states.

Related research by D’Ottone and colleagues, published in the International Journal of Psychology, found that institutional confidence was associated with lower civic honesty among people high in power-distance orientation. Together, these studies underscore that the social and political context fundamentally reshapes the meaning of trust, with implications for how civic honesty is sustained—or undermined—when criminal power coexists with or substitutes state authority.