Trust in government refers to the share of people who report having confidence in the national government. The data shown reflect the share of respondents answering “yes” (the other response categories being “no”, and “don’t know”) to the survey question: “In this country, do you have confidence in… national government?”

Due to small sample sizes, country averages for horizontal inequalities (by age, gender and education) are pooled between 2010-18 to improve the accuracy of the estimates.

The sample is ex ante designed to be nationally representative of the population aged 15 and over. The population-wide figure is returned – both sexes, all education levels – as an annual decimal fraction of that population (0.3933 for 39.33%). The breakdowns by sex and education level that the OECD publishes alongside it are not returned here.

See definition: https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm

Also known as: political trust, institutional trust.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Trust in Government for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Trust in Government in Python

The Trust in Government is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_trust_in_government as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics()

trust_in_government = economics.get_trust_in_government()

trust_in_government.loc[:, ['United States', 'Greece', 'Japan']]

Which returns:

  United States Greece Japan
2006 0.4959 0.4821 0.3248
2007 0.4039 0.4821 0.3248
2008 0.4065 nan 0.238
2009 0.3927 0.3153 0.238
2010 0.3927 0.3153 0.238
2011 0.3927 0.1556 0.2564
2012 0.3927 0.1556 0.2564
2013 0.3927 0.1556 0.2564
2014 0.3463 0.2738 0.4084
2015 0.3463 0.2738 0.3283
2016 0.3463 0.2738 0.3283
2017 0.3463 0.2415 0.387
2018 0.3463 0.2415 0.387
2019 0.3654 0.2415 0.387
2020 0.3654 0.3695 0.3443
2021 0.3654 0.3695 0.3443
2022 0.3654 0.3086 0.3798
2023 0.3654 0.3217 0.3798

Parameters

get_trust_in_government accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Government Revenue Revenue to GDP Government Tax Revenue Tax Revenue to GDP Government Expenditure Expenditure to GDP Government Deficit Deficit to GDP Real GDP (USD) Real GDP per Capita Output Gap Trade Balance

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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