Trust and the Legitimacy of Regulatory Capitalism: A Trust Ecology Approach,

Trust and the Legitimacy of Regulatory Capitalism: A Trust Ecology Approach, Shahaf Zamir and David Levi-Faur Public trust in corporations is a central yet under-theorized dimension of contemporary political economy. While prior research has examined institutional trust mainly as a determinant of regulatory demand and economic performance, , confidence in corporations as a distinct evaluative object has received limited systematic attention.. This study addresses this gap using the Integrated Values Survey — a uniquely comprehensive dataset combining all waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study, spanning 1981–2022 across 118 countries and 666,907 respondents — to map the trust ecology within which corporate confidence is embedded an Exploratory Factor Analysis of 27 trust items, yields five latent trust variables and two single-item trust measures. Multilevel models then examine the individual- and country-level predictors of trust trust in major companies (TMC). Three principal findings emerge. First, TMC constitutes an empirically distinct evaluative domain, more strongly associated with political and international institutional trust than with generalized, ingroup, or outgroup trust.. Second, country-level regulatory characteristics do not independently predict TMC once individual-level institutional trust orientations are accounted for — a finding that challenges both crowding-out accounts and additive institutional frameworks. Third, the foundations of trust in major companies (TMC) have undergone a fundamental reorganization over the study period: Outgroup and ingroup trust lost their predictive power almost entirely from the mid-2000s onward, while political institutional trust emerged as the dominant predictor. This shift suggests that public evaluations of large corporations have become increasingly decoupled from social dispositions and more tightly linked to citizens' orientations toward political authority — a pattern consistent with the broader transformation of regulatory capitalism into an object of democratic contestation. Shahaf Zamir is a postdoctoral researcher and a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a senior researcher at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility, Reichman University David Levi-Faur is The Wolfson Family Chair in Public Administration, The Federmann School of Public Policy and Government at the Department of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.