Honesty, Trust, and Legal Norms in the Transition to Democracy.

Rothstein has argued that we can create "trust from above" through a strong legal system. We might presume that countries with high levels of corruuption would have low levels of trust--and this is in fact true. Yet, the correlation between perceived corruption and trust across countries is highest where corruption is lowest. We argue that people in countries with high levels of corruption blame elites and not ordinary citizens for such corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]