Inequality,Diversity and Social Trust in Norwegian Communities

This article examines community effects on social trust in Norwegian communities. The large research literature on social trust agrees that community effects are important, but disagree about which aspects of communities influence social trust. The main current disagreement concerns the relative importance of ethnic diversity and socio-economic factors, such as income inequality within communities and differences in socio-economic standing between communities. We test the competing propositions on a Norwegian dataset consisting of 99 communities and 6,166 survey respondents within those communities arguing that it is particularly interesting to look at the relationship between diversity and social trust in the setting of a wealthy universalist welfare state. It is to our knowledge the first dataset that allows a hierarchical analysis of the determinants of social trust in the Norwegian context. The results of our models show that economic inequality, within and between communities, has a direct negative effect on social trust, but that it is not possible to separate the effects of ethnic diversity and level of unemployment. This study thus lends support to the body of research that first and foremost emphasizes the role of economic inequality in accounts of community differences and social trust.