Social Trust

Foundational and Philosophical Issues

Kevin Vallier, Michael Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

With increasingly divergent views and commitments, and an all-or-nothing mindset in political life, it can seem hard to sustain the level of trust in other members of our society necessary to ensure our most basic institutions work. This book features interdisciplinary perspectives on social trust. The contributors address four main topics related to social trust. The first topic is empirical and formal work on norms and institutional trust, especially the relationships between trust and human behaviour. The second topic concerns trust in particular institutions, notably the legal system, scientific community, and law enforcement. Third, the contributors address challenges posed by diversity and oppression in maintaining social trust. Finally, they discuss different forms of trust and social trust. Social Trust will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, political science, economics, law, psychology, and sociology.

Part I

Empirical Research on Social Trust

1Social and Legal Trust

The Case of Africa

Andreas Bergh, Christian

Bjørnskov, Kevin Vallier

We know a great deal about the effects of social trust, but much less about its causes, especially whether social trust is caused by any formal institutions as opposed to cultural forces. Effective, uncorrupted legal institutions are perhaps the most commonly cited institutional cause of social trust (Knack and Keefer 1997). This suggests that trust in legal institutions, what we will call legal trust, causes social trust to increase when legal institutions are trustworthy in enforcing formal social norms like laws, and perhaps many informal social norms as well (Rothstein and Stolle 2008). The data seems to bear this out. Trust in the legal system is higher than social trust in almost all countries. Thus, legal trust is proportionately higher than social trust in most countries. The main idea of several studies thus is that if you increase legal trust, or perhaps the basis of legal trust, then, perhaps you can increase social trust.

It is nonetheless unclear how social and legal trust are causally connected. Perhaps effective, uncorrupted legal institutions incentivize trustworthy behavior and punish untrustworthy behavior, creating more trust-building experiences in a society, and so increasing social trust all else equal. But the relationship between social and legal trust might be explained in other ways. Perhaps high-trust societies have high legal trust because higher trust leads to better functioning legal institutions and so more publicly observable legal trustworthiness (good behavior by courts and law enforcement), generating legal trust (cf. Bjørnskov 2010; Uslaner 2002). Alternatively, legal trust judgments may simply be a function of social trust judgments because citizens use social trust judgments plus the higher general reputation of police and courts to formulate a legal trust judgment, perhaps largely apart from real experiences with the legal system.

We hope to illuminate the relationship between social and legal trust by looking at cases where legal and social trust are poorly correlated, namely in many African countries. Our hypothesis is that the correlation between social and legal trust is conditional on whether people see legal officials as exemplary representatives of society as a whole. When legal officials are not seen as representative of society, whether exemplary or not, that loosens the connection between social and legal trust.

Interestingly, legal trust is still generally higher than social trust in countries where the correlation between the two is low. Accordingly, it looks like social trust judgments inform legal trust judgments when legal officials are seen as representing society, but when they are not seen as representative, legal trust judgments depend on other factors. What we feel confident in is that when legal officials are seen as representative of society, legal trust depends on social trust, and otherwise not.

We use data from the AfroBarometer to confirm our hypothesis. The AfroBarometer is a pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions, and related issues, with six rounds conducted between 1999 and 2015, and 26 countries covered in the most recent wave. The survey method is face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent's choice, and samples are nationally representative. For further details, see for example, Bratton and Gyimah-Boadi (2016).

As we have noted, in most countries social and legal trust are highly correlated, but this correlation does not exist in the countries included in the AfroBarometer. There is more variation in legal trust vis-à-vis social trust than in other countries around the world. One of the more interesting results is that in African countries with a legacy of French colonialism, people tend to have much less trust in courts, parliaments, and the ruling party (though not in the police), whereas there is no significant correlation for countries with a legacy of English colonialism. One reason for this may be that French colonial powers tended to staff institutions with their own citizens, whereas English colonial powers tended to use locals. If indeed this historical generalization holds, then that supports our hypothesis. When legal officials are not seen as representative of their society, then legal trust will be determined in other ways, perhaps by different causes than the causes of social trust. At the least, there is no transferral of social trust to legal trust in many African societies.

In this piece, intended for an audience that may not be familiar with the empirical literature on social trust, we begin by explaining and reviewing the trust measure that we appeal to and we discuss some potential challenges to that literature that we think can be overcome (1.1). We provide some historical background of the legacy of French and British colonialism in Africa, especially with respect to the staffing of legal institutions (1.2). We then discuss our data (1.3). The final section (1.4) provides some discussion of our hypothesis.

1.1 The Trust Measure

The standard measure of trust that arose in the 1960s is acquired through one simple question. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann developed the standard trust question in the late 1940s and Morris Rosenberg introduced it into large US surveys in the 1950s (Rosenberg 1956). The question is this: “In general, do you think most people can be trusted or can’t you be too careful in dealing with people?” The standard trust question has been asked in the General Social Survey (GSS) since the early 1960s, and also appears in the American National Election Studies (ANES) and other comparable surveys. The standard trust question first appears in the World Values Survey's first wave, gathered in the early 1980s. Nations, regions, and states are then assigned scores based on average trust levels within that nation, region, or state. We now have dozens of cross-national studies, beginning with Knack and Keefer's (1997) seminal work.

Some readers may worry about imperfections in the standard trust question, say whether it captures either who to trust or in which circumstances trust is appropriate. The question might also reflect different levels of risk aversion, which is distinct from trust. For instance, Fine (2001) claims that levels of social trust, as well as other aspects of social capital, depend on context and that the standard trust question appeals to different concepts in different countries. Further, Japan–US comparisons found in Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994) as well as between Sweden and Tanzania (Holm and Danielson 2007) can be used to argue that the trust measures are polluted by character dispositions and worldview. These problems are often cited by scholars who reject cross-national trust questions.

Nonetheless, several findings show that we have reason to think that the WVS trust question aggregates are accurate proxies for a well-defined understanding of trust that is cross-national and even cross-cultural. Knack and Keefer (1997) offer a simple validity test through the exploration of the numbers of wallets dropped that are returned to their owners, based on an experiment that Reader's Digest performed around the world in 1995. The shares of wallet returns track the WVS social trust scores; and it conceptually corresponds to trust since wallet returns are not observed by police, the courts, government, or other formal institutions. Wallet returns thus is evidence of a moral action, one with an honest motive, which suggests a level of trustworthiness (Uslaner 2002). And this in turn suggests a way of measuring trust, specifically how many people believe that their wallets would be returned to them if lost (Felton 2001). In the 32 cases, the correlation between return share and social trust is .57, which improves when income differences are controlled for (Knack 2001). In two out of three high trust countries, Denmark and Norway, all wallets were returned, contents unmolested. Similarly, as depicted in Figure 1.1, which we take from Bjørnskov (2019), when using return rates in the variant of the wallet drop experiment in Cohn et al. (2019), the correlation is .68 with a number of post-communist countries as clear outliers (red dots in the figure, excluding these increases the correlation to .85).

Figure 1.1 Return rates and social trust

Uslaner (2002, 2016) offers more detailed information concerning what the scores measure at the level of individuals. The 2000 ANES pilot survey asked a series of questions where almost 75% of those who responded said that the trust question measured their moral attitude toward the world rather than their encounters with others. This type of trust does not appear to reflect any kind of reputation or Bayesian updating effect (Uslaner 2002, 141). The standard trust question then is “tied to people you do not know” such as those who work at your grocery store or doctor's office. Naef and Schupp (2009) find similar results in a large German survey that includes t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Social Trust Introduction
• PART I Empirical Research on Social Trust
• PART II Concepts of Social Trust
• PART III The Ethics and Politics of Social Trust
• Short Bios and Addresses
• Index