The state and social capital: An institutional theory of generalized trust

Comparative Politics

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2008, Pages

  Rothstein, Bo ^a   Stolle, Dietlind ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG   (Sweden)

^b MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51149120995     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5129/001041508x12911362383354     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
2. Kenneth Newton, "Social Capital and Democracy in Modern Europe," in J. W. van Deth, M. Maraffi, K. Newton, and P. F. Whiteley, eds., Social Capital and European Democracy (London: Routledge, 1999);
3. Michael Woolcook, "The Place of Social Capital in Understanding Social and Economic Outcomes," ISUMA: Canadian Journal of Policy Research, 2 (2001), 11-16.
4. John F. Helliwell, "How's Life? Combining Individual and National Variables to Explain Subjective Well-Being" (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau for Economic Research, 2002).
5. Eric Uslaner, The Moral Foundation of Trust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6. Steve Knack and Philip Keefer, "Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112 (1997), 1251-88;
7. Paul J. Zak and Stephen Knack, "Trust and Growth," Economic Journal, 111 (2001), 295-321.
8. Ronald Inglehart, "Trust, Well-being and Democracy," in M. E. Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 88-120.
9. James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990);
10. Putnam, Making Democracy Work.
11. Dietlind Stolle, "Trusting Strangers: The Concept of Generalized Trust in Perspective," Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 31 (2002), 397-412.
12. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
13. Anirudh Krishna, Active Social Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
14. Francis Fukuyama, "Social Capital and Civil Society," paper presented at the Conference on Second Generation Reform, Washington, D.C., November 8-9, 1999; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
15. Dietlind Stolle, "Clubs and Congregations: The Benefit of Joining Organizations," in K. S. Cook, ed., Trust in Society (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), pp. 202-44.
16. Jan Delhey and Kenneth Newton, "Who Trusts? The Origins of Social Trust in Seven Societies," European Societies, 5 (2003), 93-137;
17. P. Claiborn and P. S. Martin, "Trusting and Joining? An Empirical Test of the Reciprocal Nature of Social Capital," Political Behavior, 22 (2000), 267-91;
18. Francisco Herreros, The Problem of Forming Social Capital: Why Trust? (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004);
19. Uslaner, The Moral Foundation of Trust.
20. Alan Brinkley, "Liberty, Community, and the National Idea," The American Prospect, 7 (2002).
21. Sheri Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," World Politics, 49 (1997), 401-29.
22. Sarah L. Henderson, "Selling Civil Society: Western Aid and the Nongovernmental Organization Sector in Russia," Comparative Political Studies, 35 (2002), 139-69.
23. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
24. Mark Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
25. Melissa Marschall and Dietlind Stolle, "Race and the City: Neighborhood Context and the Development of Generalized Trust," Political Behavior, 26 (2004), 126-53.
26. Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic"; Omar G. Encarnacion, "Civil Society Reconsidered," Comparative Politics, 38 (2006), 357-76;
27. Peter Hall, "Social Capital in Britain," British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 417-64;
28. Margaret Levi, "A State of Trust," in V. Braithwaite and M. Levi, eds., Trust and Governance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998);
29. Sidney Tarrow, "Making Social Science Work across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work," American Political Science Review, 90 (1996);
30. Staffan Kumlin and Bo Rothstein, "Making and Breaking Social Capital: The Impact of Welfare State Institutions," Comparative Political Studies, 38 (2005), 339-65.
31. Kathleen Thelen, "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective," Annual Review of Political Science, 2 (1999), 369-404.
32. Hatl, "Social Capital in Britain."
33. Max Kaase, "Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust and Non-Institutionalized Political Participation in Western Europe," West European Politics, 22 (1999), 14.
34. S. M. Lipset and W. Schneider, The Confidence Gap (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 120.
35. Ken Newton and Pippa Norris, "Confidence in Public Institutions," in S. J. Pharr and R. D. Putnam, eds., Disaffected Democracies: What's Troubling the Trilateral Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
36. Putnam, Making Democracy Work.
37. J. Brehm and W. Rahn, "Individual Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital," American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 1014.
38. Putnam, Making Democracy Work.
39. Tarrow, p. 395.
40. Levi, p. 85.
41. For the original argument, see Jack Citrin, "The Political Relevance of Trust in Government," American Political Science Review, 68 (1974), 973-88;
42. Kenneth Newton, "Social and Political Trust in Established Democracies," in P. Norris, ed., Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
43. Newton and Norris, "Confidence in Public Institutions."
44. Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell, "What Is Quality of Government: A Theory of Impartial Political Institutions," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D. C., 2005.
45. Woolcook, p. 16.
46. Beate Völker and Henry Flap, "Weak Ties as a Liability: The Case of East Germany," Rationality and Society, 13 (2001), 397-428.
47. Andrew Kydd, "Overcoming Mistrust," Rationality and Society, 12 (2000), 397-424;
48. Jan Delhey and Kenneth Newton, "Social Trust. Global Pattern or Nordic Expectionalism?," Discussion Paper 2004. 202, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
49. Claus Offe, "How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?," in Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust.
50. The argument is certainly not that all forms of "generalized trust" are caused by experiences with and trust in the impartiality and fairness of certain government institutions.
51. For a full description of the WVS data set, see www.worldvaluessurvey. org. For the SOM project, questions about trust were added to five surveys, 1996 to 2000, with funding from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Services. For information about sampling and response rates, see www. som.gu.se. The survey component of the ESC project is designed to provide information on social networks, well-being, socioeconomic status, civic participation, and attitudes toward government policies. See http:// www.yorku.ca/isr/download/ESC/ESC_Wave%201_%20Q_INDEX.pdf.
52. The third wave WVS contains the most complete battery of questions about confidence in a variety of institutions.
53. The results are confirmed in the WVS aggregate data set.
54. John Halligan, "Leadership and the Senior Service from a Comparative Perspective," in B. G. Peters and J. Pierre, eds., Handbook of Public Administration (London: Sage, 2003), pp. 98-108.
55. Citrin, "The Political Relevance of Trust in Government."
56. Trust in legal institutions could not be chosen because this item was not asked in wave 4. Therefore, trust in the army was dropped as well as the least central indicator of trust in order institutions.
57. Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, "Governance Matters III: Governance Indicators for 1996-2002," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3106 (June 30, 2003).
58. IRIS refers to the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) Data that provide annual values for indicators of the quality of governance, 1982-1997, constructed by Steve Knack and the IRIS Center, University of Maryland, from monthly ICRG data provided by PRS Group. Steve Knack and Philip Keefer, IRIS-3: International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), Data, 3rd ed. (College Park: IRIS/East Syracuse: The PRS Group, Inc., 1998).
59. These are not ideal measures of institutional impartiality, but indicators of police corruption or court corruption are not readily available.
60. Inglehart, "Trust, Weil-Being and Democracy."
61. Bo Rothstein and Eric Uslaner, "All for One: Equality, Corruption, and Social Trust," World Politics, 58 (2005) 41-72.
62. See, respectively, Inglehart, "Trust, Well-Being and Democracy"; Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, "The Determinants of Trust," NBER Working Paper Series. Nr. 7621 (2000);
63. Marc Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
64. and Putnam, Making Democracy Work.
65. Inglehart, "Trust, Well-Being and Democracy"; Brehm and Rahn, "Individual Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital."
66. See Delhey and Newton and Freitag for a similar approach.
67. This was calculated by comparing the R-squared of a regression model with institutional efficiency and impartiality measures and a model with these variables and the interaction term. On this procedure, see J. Jaccard, Interaction Effects in Multiple Regressions (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003).
68. This effect is difficult to compare to associational involvement because of their different scales; for example, being an associational member as compared to not being a member pushes .84 on the eleven point generalized trust scale.
69. The one point increase on the 0-100 scale for police rating increases the odds of trust by 6 percent, and for the rating if government scale by 5 percent.
70. Stuart Soroka, John Helliwell, and Richard Johnston, "Measuring and Modeling Interpersonal Trust," in Fiona Kay and Richard Johnston, eds., Diversity, Social Capital and the Welfare State (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), pp. 95-132.
71. Alesina and La Ferraram, "The Determinants of Trust"; Orlando Patterson, "Liberty against the Democratic State: On Historical and Contemporary Sources of American Distrust," in Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust, pp. 151-207.
72. Soroka, Helliwell, and Johnston.
73. Since all three items were included in the second and third wave of the WVS, both of them are utilized here as a cross-sectional data set. The Cronbach's alpha using these three items is alpha=.66.