Diversity and transformation of institutional configurations and trust structures

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship between institutions at the national level and actors’ consciousness/behavior. First, my statistical analysis reveals that, there has existed not only synchronic diversity of institutional configurations among advanced and Asian economies, but also diachronic diversity, even under the spread of market mechanisms in different domains in advanced countries since the 1980s. Next, I focus on the relationship between institutions and the consciousness/behavior of actors. While standard economic theory supposes that actors act solely based on self-interest, other theories argue that actors act based on multiple motives, the varieties and mixture of which could lead to the establishment of different institutions. In line with the arguments of these theories, I concentrate on the concept of trust to represent a motive other than self-interest, and empirically examine the diversity of the structure of actors’ consciousness related to trust (trust structure) and its transformation over time. What my analysis reveals is as follows. Different types of trust structures exhibited by statistical analyses have a certain degree of similarity to types of institutional configurations, which can imply that they are complementary. Furthermore, the analysis of the transformation of trust structures since the 1980s reveals three paths of transformation, which appear to be divergent rather than convergent. These paths correspond to some extent to the transformation patterns of institutional configurations. However, the correspondence between the two is not rigid, which would imply that the institution-actor linkage is a loosely coupled relation.