On September 20,
2002 I gave the keynote address to a conference on "Trust in the
Knowledge Society" at the University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland.
(The same paper was delivered at Oxford University on February 14,
2003 and at the University of Haifa, June 10, 2003 and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, June 12, 2003).
Download the paper,
"The Moral Foundations of Trust," which comes from my
book of
the same name. The paper is in both
WordPerfect
and
PDF
formats.
My
PowerPoint presentation and the full paper based upon it , "Does
Trust Drive Down Diversity?" examines whether a diverse population
encourages or discourages generalized trust. I examine a wide
range of measures of diversity and fractionalization cross-nationally
as well as survey evidence and find that only one measure of
diversity matters: Countries where minority populations are segregated
from the majority are less trusting. The
PowerPoint presentation was presented at the 2005 Canadian
Political Science Association meetings and the basis for a keynote
address to the Conference on "Understanding Diversity: Mapping and
Measuring,"
organized by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Italy. Supported by Marie
Curie Series of Conferences “EURODIV - Cultural Diversity in Europe: a
Series of Conferences” and the
full paper (PDF) was prepared for the Conference on Civil Society,
the State, and Social Capital, Bergen, Norway, May, 2005.
Also available: "Trust as a Moral Value," presented
at the Conference, "Social Capital: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,"
University of Exeter, United Kingdom, 15-20 September, 2001 and to be
published in a revised version in Dario Castiglione, Jan van Deth and
Guglielmo Wolleb, eds., Handbook of Social Capital (Oxford
University Press, 2004) as a
Word file. This revised version
summarizes the literature on trust and presents a new result showing
that diversity alone does not lead to more or less trust--but
residential segregation in nations depresses trust.
Also available: "Trust, Democracy,
and Governance:
Can Government Policies Influence
Generalized Trust?" in Dietlind Stolle and Marc Hooghe,
eds., Generating Social Capital (Palgrave, 2004) in
Word.
In July, 2003 I
gave a talk, "Generalized Trust and Why It Matters for Business in an
Age of Globalization" to the
Caux
Initiatives for Business Conference for Business and Industry,
Globalization: Closing the Gaps. I argue that trust is a key
factor in helping overcome the problems of globalization and in
promoting a more globalized world and that it offers great benefits
for business in securing a more cooperative and diverse workplace.
Download this non-technical talk prepared for audience from business
and non-profit organizations in
Word format. Download the
PowerPoint presentation.
In Uppsala, Sweden, there is
sufficient trust so that many people do not feel the need to to lock
their bicycles when they go away:
I
co-authored a paper with Kerem Ozan Kalkan, a graduate student in
Government and Politics,
"American Support for Aid to Turkey After World War II," at the
Conference on the History of American-Turkish Relations: 1833-1989,"
sponsored by Bogazici University, Harran University in Urfa, and the
Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Consulate, Istanbul, Turkey, June
4-10, 2006. Here we are (Uslaner on right, Kalkan in center)
with Walter Douglas of the U.S. Consulate:
Social interaction in Jerusalem: Generalized trust or passing in
solitude?
"Terrorism and
Trust: Sustained Violence and the Social Fabric in Israel" (with
Daphna Canetti-Nissim and Ami Pedahzur of the University of Haifa): An
examination of how sustained terrorism leads to lower levels of trust
in strangers, greater nationalistic patriotism, and to greater support
for militant solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We
also show a reciprocal relationship between militancy and
trust--higher levels of trust lead to lower levels of militancy.
We examine seven surveys from 2000 to 2003 to make these claims and
also show that levels of trust vary over time with the extent of
terrorism Israelis face. Download the paper in
Word format.
Also see "Trust and Terrorism: Reflections on a
Theoretical Framework and Some Empirical Findings," a summary of the
"Terrorism and Trust" paper and of related findings on the effects of
trust and terrorism in the United States. This brief summary was
prepared for the International Assembly on Managing the Psychology of
Terror" sponsored by Issues
Deliberation America/Issues Deliberation Australia.
Austin, TX, August 19-21, 2004. Download the summary in
PDF format.
Making laws where they are least
needed: The parliament in Helsinki, Finland, one of the most trusting
societies in the world:
And in another
high trusting society, the Riksdag in Sweden:
Here I am with Bruno von Sydow, the Speaker of the Riksdag:
I gave a keynote speech to the
International Conference on Social Capital of the Economic and
Research Institute of the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, Tokyo,
March 25, 2003. Download the
paper I wrote for that conference and the two PowerPoint
presentations,
"Trust and Economic Growth in the Knowledge Society" and
"Trust in the Knowledge Society."
Routine business in Japan depends
upon social capital:
And there is no shortage of picnics in the park in
Tokyo:
Here I am with a geisha at a restaurant in Tokyo; my host is Dr.
Takashi Omori of the Economic and Social Research Institute of the
Government of Japan:
I have also written a short
nontechnical paper summarizing my work on trust for a an issue of European Political Science
(volume 2, 2003, 43-48), edited
by
Sigrid Roßteutscher and Spencer Wellhofer. Download it in
WordPerfect or
PDF formats.
I currently have
a three-year (2001-2004) grant from the Russell
Sage Foundation. The grant is for a project,
"Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement." In this
research I seek to explain falling levels of civic engagement in the
United States from the 1960s to the present. Fewer Americans are
participating in civic life, especially in arenas that demonstrate a
strong commitment to one’s community such as giving to charity and
volunteering time. I argue that rising levels of economic inequality
are a key reason why participation has fallen. But the relationship
between inequality and declining participation may not be direct. I
offer an alternative explanation: Rising inequality makes people less
optimistic for the future, which makes them less trusting of others,
and thus less likely to take part in activities that bind them to
their communities. I shall test this claim through statistical models
and present findings to both the scholarly community and to the larger
public. Download the grant proposal in either
pdf
format or WordPerfect
format.
Not all volunteering, even
for good causes, brings people of different backgrounds together to
create (or rely upon) generalized trust. Note the sign at the
Manley Beach Life Saving Club in Sydney, Australia.
From the Russell
Sage project, M. Michell Brown of the University of Maryland and I
have written "Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,"
American Politics Research, 33 (2005).
We examine
why people ‘violate’ rationality and take part in their communities,
differentiating by types of participation, particularly political
versus other, more communal, types of participation. We argue that
trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to
more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to
participation. In addition, we posit that trust is strongly affected
by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state level data
for the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we present a series of two-stage
least-squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on
participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings
indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust, and
that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on
political participation.
Download
the published paper in PDF format.
"Where You Stand
Depends Upon Where Your Grandparents Sat: The Inheritability of
Generalized Trust" examines the roots of generalized trust from the
General Social Survey in the United States. Using a model based
upon my earlier work, I find that ethnic heritage (especially
for people of Nordic and British background) leads to increased trust,
but the share of people of different ethnic groups has considerably
less effect on trust. Thus, your heritage seems to count more
than the composition of the ethnic communities where you live.
Download the paper in
PDF format.
A community
event brings people of all backgrounds together: black, white, yellow,
red,
and, in Okahune township, New Zealand, even orange for the Carrot
Carnival every August:
I wrote a paper
summarizing what we know about civic engagement for the Knight
Foundation's Civic Engagement Project Co-Directed by The Democracy
Collaborative, University of Maryland–College Park and the Center for
the Study of Voluntary Organizations and Service, Georgetown
University. Download the paper, "Civic Engagement in America:
Why People Participate in Political and Social Life" in either
WordPerfect or
PDF format.
"Sex, Lies, and
Audiotapes: The Watergate and Monica Lewinsky Scandals in American
Politics, In John Garrard and James A. Newell, eds., Scandals in
Past and Contemporary Politics (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2004, forthcoming) is an examination of the greater
partisanship involved in the Clinton impeachment compared to the Nixon
impeachment among the public. Download the paper in
Word format.
"Civil Society
Development on the Black Sea: Social Involvement in the Republic of
Moldova and Romania," Interim Report to the International Research and
Exchanges Board (with Paul Sum, Gabriel Badescu, Mihai Pisica, and
Cosmin Marian) on the results of our surveys of trust and civic
engagement in Romania and the Republic of Moldova among both the mass
public and organizational activists. The grant was administered
by IREX under the
Black and
Caspian Sea Collaborative Research Program funded by the Starr
Foundation. Download the report in
Word format.
"Trust as an
Alternative to Risk," presented at the C
onference
on
"Trust and
the Management of Technological Risk: Implications for Business and
Society," University of Zurich (Switzerland), September 17-20, 2003,
and at the
Conference on Trust, Department of Philosophy, University of
California--Riverside, February 27-28, 2004.
I present an argument that people who trust others underestimate the
level of risk in daily life and present evidence, from the Pew Civic
Engagement Survey in metropolitan Philadelphia in 1996, where
people
were asked about the safety of walking in their neighborhoods at
night. Trusters were far more likely to say that their
neighborhoods were safe, even controlling for the actual level of
violence in their neighborhoods, where they lived, whether they had
been the victim of a crime, or their parents had been the victims of
crime. Download the paper in
PDF format.
A
less technical
version is forthcoming
in M.
Siegrist, H. Gutscher, and T. C. Earle (Eds.), Trust, Technology,
and Society: Studies in Cooperative Risk Management (London:
Earthscan, 2005
"What is a
Good Citizen? How Romanians Think of Citizenship Obligations,"
for the Conference on Contemporary Citizenship: The Politics of
Exclusion and Inclusion: Is There a Chance for a Post-National
Citizenship?, Ljubljana, Slovenia, December 5-6, 2003. Romanians
have stronger expectations that good citizens will obey the law than
they will be active in civic life or think of others. Underlying
almost all expectations of good citizenship (using the CID survey of
the Romanian public) are views of government performance rather than
senses of social values (trust and tolerance) or group ties.
Download in
PDF format.
"Political
Parties and Social Capital, Political Parties or Social
Capital," for Richard S. Katz and William F. Crotty, eds., Handbook
of Political Parties (Sage, forthcoming, 2004). Download the
paper in
PDF format. I argue that political parties do not (and
perhaps ought not) to encourage civic participation in party
activities. Nor do they lead to greater trust in fellow
citizens. Parties are organizations for winning elections and
too much participation can make this task difficult.
Two pictures of very dense social
capital. We made 2,505 new friends (2,500 sheep, 2 people, and 3
dogs) outside Wakahapa Village, New Zealand in July, 2003. They
kept us company for almost half an hour. In the bottom picture,
we are in the white car in the center.
"Trust and Social Bonds: Faith in
Others and Policy Outcomes Reconsidered," a response to Rodney Hero's
article, "Multiple Traditions in American Politics and Racial Policy
Inequality," both forthcoming in September, 2004 (v. 57) in Political Research
Quarterly. Hero argues that new data on policy outcomes
shows that social capital may often lead to worse outcomes (in
economics and education, among others) for minority populations in the
American states. I argue that some of Hero's estimates are
misplaced and others show quite strong positive connections of more
equal outcomes with trust. I also show that levels of trust and
economic inequality within the African-American community do
not shape state-level African-American participation in political and
civic life. However, higher levels of trust among all citizens
and lower levels of overall economic inequality are strongly connected
to higher rates of African-American participation. Download the
PDF file.
Social connections in Istanbul (right)
and Athens (left), where men (but not women) drink coffee and gamble
at cafes:
Men also gather in Greece's National
Garden to toss dice (left), but it seems to be a place where social
connections may not be connected to trust (right):
"Trust and Civil
Society in East and West," in Gabriel Badescu and Eric M.
Uslaner, eds., Social Capital and the Transition to Democracy (Routledge,
2003). This paper, available in
Word format, applies the model in my
The Moral
Foundations of Trust to a comparison of Western publics with
citizens of the former Communist countries. The same general
model holds in both countries; trust is lower in the former Communist
countries because optimism and especially a sense of control is far
lower.
Hungarians
bowling (but not alone) in a Budapest mall:
Bowling is even bigger in Ljubljana,
Slovenia (but never alone):
But almost alone: "Bowling
Almost Alone: Political Participation in a New Democracy," for the
2004 Joint Sessions of Workshops at the European Consortium for
Political Research (download
PDF): What underlies conventional and unconventional participation
in Romania? Contrary to much research in the West, conventional
and unconventional participation have different roots: People who are
satisfied with life and who join civic associations take part in
conventional politics, but people who believe that the system is
stacked against them engage in protest politics.
Even in the
United States, lots of people bowl in groups, especially in
highly-educated suburbs with blue politics:
Dietlind Stolle
and I examined "The Structure of Trust in Canada" in a paper presented
at the Association for Canadian Studies meetings in November, 2003.
We found few connections with civic engagement using the Equality,
Security, Community survey in 1999/2000. We found strong
negative effects for in-group ties, for Quebecois--and we also found
that people who viewed the courts (and important vehicle for national
unity in Canada) are more trusting. We also found small
correlations between perceptions of who would return wallets (a
measure of honesty sometimes linked to trust) and generalized trust.
Download the paper in Word format.
"Trust and
Consequences": a non-technical summary of my work on trust and
civic engagement presented at the Communitarian Summit, February,
1999, Arlington, VA (pdf version, WordPerfect version). Also available is
the more technical version published in Political Science
Quarterly, v. 115 (December, 2000), pp. 569-590 under the title
"Producing and Consuming Trust" (pdf
version, WordPerfect
version)
"Social Capital,
Television, and the ‘Mean World’: Trust, Optimism, and Civic
Participation," Political Psychology, v. 19 (September,
1998), pp. 441-467 (typescript: pdf version, WordPerfect version). This is the paper that
exonerates television as a cause of the decline in trust and/or civic
engagement in the United States.
"Trust But
Verify: Social Capital and Moral Behavior," Social Science
Information, v. 38 (March, 1999), pp. 29-56 (typescript, pdf version, WordPerfect version). This paper examines the
linkage between trust in other people and commitment to strong standards
of moral behavior using data from the World Values Surveys.
"Democracy
and Social Capital," in Mark Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 121-150 (typescript,
pdf version, WordPerfect version). Early summary of my research
on trust and its relationship to democratic government.
(with Richard Conley): "Civic Engagement and Particularized Trust :The
Ties that Bind People to Their Ethnic Communities" (originally
presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, published in American Politics Research, 31, July,
2003) (pdf version). Ethnic ties may
lead people to withdraw from civic engagement in the larger society.
Using a Los Angeles Times survey of ethnic Chinese in Southern
California, we show that people who restrict their social ties to
their own group and who are wary of American culture more generally
are less likely to participate in the politics of the larger society.
"Is Washington
Really the Problem?" Prepared for presentation at the Hendricks
Symposium of Dissatisfaction with American Government, University
of Nebraska–Lincoln, October 8-11, 1998 (pdf version, WordPerfect version). This paper argues that
people who distrust government don’t like any level of
government. Thus proposals to decentralize authority will not
restore confidence in government. This essay was published
in John Hibbing and Elizabeth Thiess-Morse, eds., What Is It
About Government That Americans Dislike? (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
aper,
with 
the Democratic party is fear of evangelicals, who have become more
powerful in American society and especially within the Republican party.
Non-Jews were did not base their vote choices on attitudes toward
fundamentalists. For non-Jews views of the Christian Right were tied
in closely to other culture war issues (ideology, abortion, gay unions,
and gun control)--while for Jews, attitudes toward evangelicals were more
of an issue of identity than of a culture war over social issues.
