Does education amplify the corrosive effect of corruption on institutional trust? Micro-level evidence from Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan has raised university enrolment from 9% to 42% of eligible youth since 2016 while corruption has remained entrenched. This paper asks what happens where expansion and corruption meet, testing the Hakhverdian and Mayne framework at the individual level with original survey data from 186 respondents collected in late 2025. Ordered logit models with an education and corruption interaction term are estimated for trust in four institutions: the police, courts, the Anti-Corruption Agency and the Labour Ministry. Corruption exposure sharply reduces institutional trust among citizens with university education but has no discernible effect among those without, and the interaction is strongest for the Labour Ministry and the Anti-Corruption Agency. Pursuing educational expansion and anti-corruption reform at once therefore contains an internal tension: graduates enter the labour market with heightened expectations of meritocratic governance, and when those expectations are violated the result is selective institutional disillusionment among precisely the citizens the reform agenda most needs to retain.

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