1 Trust and Institutional Compliance 1 Henry Farrell and Jack Knight Abstract Scholars in different literatures in political science suggest that both institutions and trust are key to economic and political success. However, even though it is plausible that the two are inter-related, we lack good theories of how institutions may affect trust, or vice- versa. In this article, we provide a theoretical framework that (a) allows us to understand how institutions affect trust, while (b) distinguishing clearly between simple institutional compliance and the effects of institutions on inter-personal trust. We examine how power relations and the degree of formality/informality of institutions shape the ways in which they are likely or unlikely to affect the levels of trust among a given community of actors. We sketch out how our findings are likely to have consequences for empirical research across a variety of settings. 1 We are grateful to Peter Hall, Gary Miller, Kimberly Morgan, Melissa Schwartzberg and workshop participants at the Copenhagen Business School, Duke University and Washington University in St. Louis for comments on earlier drafts of this article.