Trust and Distrust as Distinct Concepts: Why Studying Distrust in Institutions is Important

Abstract

Scholarship of trust in institutions has tended to see trust and distrust as opposites on one continuum. Theoretical advances have challenged this view and now consider trust and distrust as different constructs, and thus as constructs with different characteristics and partly different determinants. Current empirical research on trust in government has so far done little to incorporate these findings, and has largely continued to rely on traditional survey items assuming a trust–distrust continuum. We rely on the literature in organization studies and political science to argue in favour of measuring citizen trust and distrust as distinct concepts and discuss future research challenges.     

Alliteration in Mate Selection: Does Barbara Still Marry Barry?

More than 30 years ago research found that alliteration is a factor in assortative mating (i.e., marriages). Alliterative matches were even more frequent when using nicknames than when using given names. Subsequently, researchers have confirmed the higher than chance occurrence of alliterative matches for given names. But nicknames have not been examined over the past 30 years. The present research finds support for three hypotheses. As predicted, nicknames are more associated with alliterative matches than are given names. Implications for practice are discussed.     

The discourse of 19th-century French liberal socialism

ABSTRACT

This article analyses late 19th-century French liberal socialist syntheses of liberty and equality, building on the existing body of literature on liberal socialism to illustrate the influence of the non-Marxist left on its development through a focus on the work of the Radical, Célestin Bouglé, and the Socialists, Benoît Malon and Charles Andler. The analysis of these thinkers demonstrates the ideological similarities of liberal socialisms of thinkers hailing from both the non-Marxist left and the new liberalism. A concluding section suggests that liberal socialism offers social democrats and progressive liberals an ideological heritage from which to pose a radical alternative to contemporary forms of neoliberalism.     

‘Reading the ads in al-Daʿwa magazine: commercialism and Islamist activism in al-Sadat’s Egypt’

ABSTRACT

This article probes the return of the Muslim Brotherhood to prominence in 1970s Egypt through a systematic analysis of advertisements in the organization’s flagship periodical, al-Da?wa (The Call). In every issue of the magazine, which was published between June 1976 and October 1981, entreaties to proper conduct and appeals to Islamic solidarity appeared alongside advertisements for everything from Pepsi to breakfast biscuits to automobiles. We utilize the methodological insights of social and cultural historians to the value of advertisements to cast new light on the reconstruction of the Brotherhood, its relationship with the diverse institutions comprising the Egyptian state, and on how the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision of piety both reflected and challenged a changing economic reality. Moving beyond a story of the Brotherhood’s return as a product of independent Islamist enterprise that had emerged due to both the Gulf oil boom and Egypt’s economic liberalization programme, significant public sector advertising in al-Da?wa, especially prominent across the most valuable advertising real estate, underscores both internal divisions within the Egyptian state as well as the tangible ways that various state institutions were patrons of religious change.     

Measuring Trade Profile with Granular Product-Level Data

The product composition of bilateral trade encapsulates complex relationships about comparative advantage, global production networks, and domestic politics. Despite the availability of product-level trade data, most researchers rely on either the total volume of trade or certain sets of aggregated products. In this article, we develop a new dynamic clustering method to effectively summarize this massive amount of product-level information. The proposed method classifies a set of dyads into several clusters based on their similarities in trade profile—the product composition of imports and exports—and captures the evolution of the resulting clusters over time. We apply this method to two billion observations of product-level annual trade flows. We show how typical dyadic trade relationships evolve from sparse trade to interindustry trade and then to intra-industry trade. Finally, we illustrate the critical roles of our trade profile measure in international relations research on trade competition.     

Understanding xenophobic hate crime in South Africa

Hundreds of violent incidents of anti‐immigrant hate crimes have been recorded in South Africa over the past two decades. Understanding how the public views this issue helps us better understand how it can be resolved. The paper identifies determinants of public attitudes towards anti‐xenophobia strategies. Data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey for the period 2015–2018 were used for this study. Using these data, the link between anti‐immigrant sentiment and lay attributes of anti‐immigrant violence can be mapped. The results show that most citizens externalise the causes of this kind of hate crime and blame the victims (i.e., foreigners) for the conflict. What people believe about the etiology of an intergroup conflict was found to influence their desire for conflict resolution as well as the type of solutions preferred. Victim blaming was found to predict the adoption of prejudicial solutions to anti‐immigrant hate crime (such as the mass expulsion of foreign nationals). If an individual attributed the violence to the internal attributes (e.g., emotional factors or beliefs about foreign nationals) of the perpetrators, they were more likely to adopt progressive solutions (such as education and awareness campaigns).     

Network of Networks: Preliminary Lessons from the Antwerp Port Authority on Crisis Management and Network Governance to Deal with the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this article, the authors describe and illustrate what they call a “network of networks” perspective and map the development of a lead network for the Antwerp Port Authority that governed organizations and networks in the port community before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that setting a collective focus and selective integration are crucial in the creation and reproduction of an effective system to adequately deal with a wicked problem like the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings on crisis management and network governance are used to engage practitioners and public policy planners to revisit the current design and governance of organizational networks within organizational fields that have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.