Social Trust, Social Capital and Perceptions of Immigration

Analyses of social capital and immigration have stressed the negative impact that culturally diverse societies have for the development of social trust. Ethnic heterogeneity, according to these studies, is associated with lower levels of social trust. However, social trust has not been studied as an independent variable in order to explain attitudes towards immigration. This article argues that societies with high levels of social capital facilitate the integration of immigrants because those members with high levels of social trust will tend to have more positive attitudes towards immigration. This hypothesis is empirically tested in a cross-country multi-level empirical analysis for sixteen European countries, drawing on the 2002–3 European Social Survey. This analysis shows that, regardless of the impact of other individual-level variables and contextual variables such as levels of unemployment or percentage of foreign population, those with high social capital do exhibit more positive attitudes towards immigration than the rest of the population.     

Social Capital and the Dynamics of Trust in Government

It is well understood that trust in government responds to the performance of the president, Congress, and the economy. Despite improved government performance, however, trust has never returned to the levels witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. Social capital may be the force that has kept trust low. If so, we need to assess the relative contributions of both government performance and social capital at the macro level. Using macrolevel data, the analysis, here, is designed to capture the variation over time in both social capital and government performance and let them compete to explain the macro variation in trust. The empirical results demonstrate that both government performance and social capital matter, but that social capital appears to be the force which accounts for the decline in trust over the last 40 years.     

Manufacturing Trust: Community Currencies and the Creation of Social Capital

In this study I examine whether an innovative government program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in increasing the level of generalized interpersonal trust in the community by rewarding civic participation by local citizens. Japan has sponsored the development of a number of “community currency” programs at the local level that are designed to create social capital. A community currency is a local “money” that is only useable within a neighborhood or town. In a typical community currency program, a town rewards civic volunteers with credits to barter with other citizens, use at participating stores, or pay for town services. These programs are specifically designed to stimulate generalized trust by rewarding civic engagement and encouraging social interaction. I evaluate whether the new Tekona community currency program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in raising levels of trust among participants, as compared to a randomly selected control group of town residents. I find that community currency involvement increases general trust, which demonstrates that it is possible to institute government programs that create social capital.

Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.     

Mobile Trust,Enacted Relationships: Social Capital in a State-Level Policy Network

ABSTRACT

What holds a policy network together? Our previous work on policy networks and “network systems” (Rethemeyer 2005 Rethemeyer , R. Karl. 2005 . “Conceptualizing and Measuring Collaborative Networks.” . Public Administration Review 64 ( 6 ): 62 – 66 . [Google Scholar]; 2007a,b; Rethemeyer and Hatmaker 2008 Rethemeyer , R. Karl and Deneen M. Hatmaker. 2008 . “Network Management Reconsidered: An Inquiry into Management of Network Structures in Public Sector Service Provision.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18 : 617 – 646 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggests that personal social capital, organizational social capital, and resource dependence are complementary bases for cohesion in policy networks. In this article we take up the challenge issued by Ibarra, Kilduff, and Tsai (2005 Ibarra , Herminia , Martin Kilduff , and Wenpin Tsai. 2005 . “Zooming In and Out: Connecting Individuals and Collectivities at the Frontiers of Organizational Network Research.” . Organization Science 16 ( 4 ): 359 – 371 .[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 359) to “bring the individual back in” to network studies by examining the dynamics between individual and organizational social capital (a process that has not been fully developed in the literature) and to tighten the connection between social capital and resource dependence. Although researchers acknowledge that personal social capital contributes to organizational social capital (Knoke 1999 ——— . 1999 . “Organizational Networks and Corporate Social Capital.” Pp. 17 – 42 in R. T. A. J. Leenders and S. M. Gabbay , eds., Corporate Social Capital and Liability . Boston : Kluwer Academic Publishers . [Google Scholar]; Burt 1992 Burt , Ronald S. 1992 . Structural Holes . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar]), to our knowledge, no studies have examined how it contributes in a longitudinal, interorganizational policy network study.In this paper we present findings from a longitudinal case study of an adult basic education policy network between 1998 (“Wave 1”) and 2005 (“Wave 2”) in a state we have pseudonymed “Newstatia.” Using the theoretical framework from the first section and the case findings in section three, we weave together social capital and resource dependence to present the concept of “enacted interorganizational relationships.”     

How Trust Matters: The Changing Political Relevance of Political Trust

Americans most often think about government in terms of its ability to grapple with issues of redistribution and race. However, the September 11 terrorist attacks led to a massive increase in media attention to foreign affairs, which caused people to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. We demonstrate that such changes in issue salience alter the policy preferences that political trust shapes. Specifically, we show that trust did not affect attitudes about the race‐targeted programs in 2004 as it usually does, but instead affected a range of foreign policy and national defense preferences. By merging survey data gathered from 1980 through 2004 with data from media content analyses, we show that, more generally, trust's effects on defense and racial policy preferences, respectively, increase as the media focus more attention in these areas and decrease when that attention ebbs.     

Investigating the Roots of Civic Morality: Trust, Social Capital, and Institutional Performance

In the last decade considerable research in social sciences has focused on interpersonal trust, treating it as a remedy for most maladies modern democracies suffer from. Yet, if others act dishonestly, trust is turned into gullibility, thus mechanisms linking interpersonal trust with institutional success refer implicitly to honesty and civic morality. This paper investigates the roots of civic morality. It applies hierarchical models to data from 38 countries, and tests the individual, community and structural explanatory factors. The results of the analysis point to the relevance of an institutional dimension, both in the form of individuals’ perceptions as well as the quality of governance: confidence in political institutions and their objective quality are the strongest predictors of civic morality. At the same time, the findings show that the recently popular claims about the importance of social capital for citizens’ moral standards are largely unfounded.

传媒对大学生政治信任和社会信任的影响研究

基于对合肥市大学生的问卷调查,我们对媒体与大学生的信任关系进行了研究。结果发现,大学生印刷媒体的总体性使用对他们的政治信任有积极的影响,但网络媒体的总体性使用对他们的社会和政治信任的影响却是消极的。多年来,中国传媒研究者有关媒体政治、社会效果的研究,一直存在着媒体宣传动员效果和宣传回飞镖效应的争论,但本研究的发现既不完全支持前者。也不完全支持后者,我们还对相关的发现进行了讨论。     

Community Size,Social Capital,and Political Participation in Latin America

Political Behavior - Political participation is often conceived of as a largely individual act. In this paper we emphasize the context in which that choice is made: features of that context make...     

Government Communications,Political Trust and Compliant Social Behaviour: The Politics of Covid-19 in Britain

It is commonly said that the lockdowns and social distancing necessary to control coronavirus pandemics will only work if the general population trusts its government, believes the information it provides, and has confidence in its policies. This article traces the British government’s record in providing information about its policies and performance, and compares this with the public’s use of the mainstream news media. It then considers how these two sources of information affected trust in government and public compliance with social distancing and lockdown rules. Lastly, it compares Covid-19 with Brexit and draws conclusions about how beliefs and behaviour are formed when individuals are personally faced with a serious threat.     

Japanese Network Capital: The Impact of Social Networks on Japanese Political Participation

Recent scholarship shows that social capital has a large influence on political behavior. Social capital’s definition includes trust, norms of reciprocity, and social networks. Most studies, however, ignore the networking component. Here, we test the influence of social networks on political participation using new Japanese survey data. We separately test the effects of involvement in formally organized voluntary associations and informal social networks. We also examine whether hierarchical networks have a different impact on participation than equal relationships. To determine if networks with bridging or bonding social capital affect participation differently, we also measure the openness to outsiders of these networks. Negative binomial regression models indicate a strong positive relationship between formal and informal social networking—including network hierarchy and some forms of openness—and political participation.     

Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden1

That organizational involvement has a positive impact on political action is a well‐established finding in empirical research around the world. To account for this, theorists since Tocqueville have pointed to the returns in human capital, in particular ‘civic skills’, yielded by associations. This article, by contrast, is a study of whether social capital theory can help explain the same effect. According to the logic of ‘weak ties’, organizational involvement provides bridging social capital by connecting the individual to a wider range of people. As a result, the input of requests for participation increases and this ultimately leads to more activity. Unspecified in this argument, however, is what aspect of associational memberships is most conducive to such weak ties: the sheer number of memberships, or the extent to which one's memberships provide links to people of dissimilar social origin. In an unprecedented empirical test based on survey data from Sweden in 1997, it is shown that being connected to multiple voluntary associations is what matters for political activity, not the extent to which one's memberships cut across social cleavages. Moreover, the social capital mechanism of recruitment is more important in explaining this effect than the human capital mechanism of civic skills, since the former can account for why even passive members, not just organizational activists, may become more prone to take political action.     

Political Trust,Individual‐level Characteristics and Institutional Performance: Evidence from Finland, 2004–13

Several scholars agree that low political trust has fundamental negative implications for society at large. This study tests the power of institutional performance theory in explaining the differences between individuals in political trust (cross‐sectional) and fluctuations of political trust over time (longitudinal). Indeed, the dominant scholarly debate has concerned whether political trust is stable and dependent of endogenous factors such as political socialization and social trust, or whether it is exogenous (i.e., in constant fluctuation due to later experiences with institutions and the outputs they produce). In terms of cross‐sectional differences, the aim is to assess the relative impact institutional performance on political trust of a citizen. As regards the longitudinal approach, political trust varies over time and from an explanatory perspective it is important also to understand how well the institutional performance theory predicts over‐time variation of political trust. The study employs repeated European Social Survey data for Finland between 2004 and 2013. The results show, first and foremost, the strong impact of evaluations of institutional performance on political trust: satisfaction with government and economy explains differences both between individuals and over time. Social trust and welfare state performance are also strong predictors, but they explain differences only at the individual level and do not predict over‐time variations.     

The Dark Side of Social Capital Re-examined from a Policy Analysis Perspective: Networks of Trust and Corruption

Abstract

This work deepens the analysis of the “dark side” of social capital proposed by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landlot and revisited by Peter Graeff. For this purpose, it combines the individualistic approach of economic theory with the social perspective of other social sciences to study the economics of corruption embedded in a social structure (a network of trust). It assesses the importance of social relations as a necessary condition to achieve corrupt objectives. To do so, a model of corrupt public contracts embedded in networks of trust is built. Theoretical evidence is found on the importance of networks of trust for the success of corrupt deals between officials and recipients. In addition, seeds are sown for future research and analysis of the role of institutions and monitoring agencies. Finally, the foundation is laid for research in the field of experimental economics to conduct an empirical examination of this proposed model and some policy implications are derived.     

Introduction: Social Capital in Scandinavia

In this special issue of Scandinavian Political Studies it is explored how the concept of social capital relates to the Scandinavian context. It is common knowledge that Scandinavia performs well with regard to many aspects of social capital, such as the level of trust and the density of membership in voluntary associations. Contrary to developments in the United States, there is little evidence of a decline in social capital in Scandinavia. There are thus several reasons why Scandinavia offers an especially interesting testing ground for many of the hypotheses and problems generated by social capital theory. What kind of empirical evidence do we have for the changes of social capital in Scandinavia? If high levels of social capital are indeed an important attribute of Scandinavian society, how can such high levels be maintained? What is the relation between, on the one hand, social capital in the form of norms about reciprocity and, on the other hand, the Social Democratic type of encompassing and universal welfare state? Is there something special about the types of mechanisms that are behind the abundance and maintenance of social capital in Scandinavia? It is argued that the high level of social capital in the Scandinavian countries can be explained by (a) the high degree of economic equality, (b) the low level of patronage and corruption and (c) the predominance of universal non‐discriminating welfare programmes.     

When Public Participation in Administration Leads to Trust: An Empirical Assessment of Managers' Perceptions

This study empirically assesses the argument that public participation enhances public trust. A model was constructed to include five intermediate factors that might link participation and trust: consensus building, ethical behaviors, accountability practices, service competence, and managerial competence. As expected, participation does explain a significant amount of public trust. However, using path analysis, only two intermediate factors—ethical behaviors and service competence—were found to significantly contribute to trust. Even successful consensus-building activities are not likely to enhance trust unless administrative performance improves. These results indicate that if increasing public trust is the primary goal, then the primary focus should be on administrative integrity and performance results.     

From Semi-presidentialism to Parliamentary Government: Political and Constitutional Developments in Finland

Within the framework of a 'mixed constitution', the Finnish political system wavered during a period of 80 years between genuine parliamentarism and effective semi-presidential rule. The new constitution, adopted in the parliament almost unanimously and carried into effect on 1 March 2000, aimed to reduce the powers of the president and to bind the exercise of the president's remaining powers more tightly to the cooperation of the parliamentary government. The constitution will act as a buffer, preventing any recurrence of the presidential activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the political climate is in fact amenable to the further development of parliamentary modes of operation. It is clearly to be expected that the strengthening of the parliament–government axis and the reduction of the president's powers will distance the head of state from the everyday policy making and emphasize his or her role as a support of the government of the time, a moderator in conflicts and a mirror of popular opinion. In the future, the functioning of the political system will not be directed so much by reference to the political capital and personal activities of the president, but rather by reference to the parliamentary constellation, party interrelations and the ebb and flow of governing coalitions.     

Collective Political Action as Civic Voluntarism: Analysing Ethnic Associations as Political Participants by Translating Individual-level Theory to the Organizational Level

This article presents and empirically evaluates an analytical experiment in which we seek to translate individual-level explanations of differences in political participation to an organizational level. Utilizing the Civic Voluntarism Model, we analyse the consequences of voluntary associations’ politically valuable ‘resources’, ‘motivation’, and ‘recruitment networks’. Using data from a survey of ethnic associations in Stockholm, Sweden, results suggest that the overall logic of how associational-level political participation is encouraged resembles corresponding mechanisms on the individual level. We conclude that both our theoretical argument and empirical findings merit further analyses of civil society actors’ political participation with the approach taken in this study.     

Apathy and its Discontents: Social Capital and Social Awkwardness in American Life

ABSTRACT

The transformation of the state in the neoliberal era has characterized the debate in international/comparative political economy and political science scholarship. Many of such accounts, however, often assume a static and reified vision of the state. In contrast, this study, by focusing on the dimension of political agency in the state, provides for a qualitative analysis of the transformations of the Italian state during the consolidation of neoliberalism (1988–2009). Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of the political economy of Italian governments, the article tests two main hypotheses. First, similar discursive strategies of legitimation of neoliberal reforms and permanent austerity are found across the party-system. Second, these strategies occur, with no significant variations, throughout the period considered by our study. The aims of the article are three. First, to emphasize the relevance of political agency in the state to the imposition of neoliberalization; second, to explore how the neoliberal idea of state is redefined within a constellation of collateral discursive strategies; third, to emphasize the importance of the analysis of context-based discursive strategies of neoliberalization. While the empirical analysis confirms the cross-party and longitudinal extension of neoliberal political economy, the conclusions discuss the relevance of these findings to understand contemporary democratic crisis.