Recently Armenian political figure Vartan Oskanian joined Twitter. He tweeted a speech that he gave where  he claimed that lack of trust in government is a cause of migration in Armenia.

Thanks to him for giving me a hypothesis to test!

Using the preliminary 2011 Caucasus Barometer, I looked at the relationship between desire to temporarily or permanently migrate and trust in government. And guess what? Oskanian is right!

For those that want to short-term migrate, they are statistically significantly less likely to trust these institutions than those that do not want to short-term migrate:

education system, army, courts, parliament, president, media, and the church.

Desire to short-term migrate had no effect on trust in these institutions:

healthcare, banks, NGOs, Prime Minster, police, local government, ombudsman, EU, and UN.

And for those that are interested in permanently migrating, it gets even more interesting.

Those with a desire to permanently migrate were statistically significantly less trusting in these institutions:

healthcare system, banks, education system, army, court system, NGOs, parliament, Prime Minister, president, police, media, local government, church, and ombudsman.

There was no impact on trust in the EU or UN.

So, yeah… this is interesting!

For more on who wants to migrate, check this out from 2010. Also I have a paper on trust in the government in Armenia here.