Culture or context? Institutional trust across and within regions

Cultural groups often differ in how much they trust political institutions. Yet such differences need not reflect culture alone or at all because cultural groups are frequently embedded in distinct institutional environments. I examine this issue in Switzerland, where linguistic diversity overlaps with cantonal federalism and allows language-group differences in trust to be studied across and within institutional contexts. Using pooled cross-sectional survey data, I find that French-speaking respondents report lower trust in cantonal authorities than German-speaking respondents in national comparisons. This gap attenuates sharply within cantons, indicating that much of the national difference is associated with between-canton variation. Consistent with this pattern, the national French–German gap is substantially attenuated when cross-cantonal differences in direct-democratic participation rights are taken into account. Evidence from bilingual cantons further reinforces this contextual interpretation, as language-group differences vary in ways consistent with minority status rather than following a uniform French–German divide.