![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Greenland is a self-governing part of the Danish realm with an institutional system in transition from colonisation to further independence. Greenlandic governance institutions currently represent a mix of Greenlandic and Danish governance systems rooted in the Danish constitution and a Scandinavian universal welfare model. Denmark and other Nordic countries with similar governance systems and welfare models have high levels of generalised trust strongly correlated with institutional trust. No research has however been carried out in Greenland regarding generalised or institutional trust and their correlates – a research gap which this article seeks to remedy. The study is based on data from the Greenland Perspectives survey of 2018 and finds that generalised trust in Greenland is significantly different from the Danish average and the levels of other Nordic countries. Institutional trust positively and significantly correlates with generalised trust in line with theories of institutional trust as a driver of generalised trust. Greenlandic identity is negatively correlated with generalised trust contrary to theories of identity and majority/minority dynamics. The correlations between generalised trust, institutional trust, and identity are surprisingly not confounded by education or income, contrary to success and well-being theories of generalised trust. The study concludes that institutions and identity clearly matter, but in a different way than theories predict. The results raise an important question for further research of how institutions and identity come to matter in Greenland – especially how institutional quality is created under the complex bureaucratic and social conditions of the post-colonial microstate.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the Greenlandic Research Council for financially supporting the pilot project that started this Ph.D.- project. The author thanks the peer-reviewers for very valuable substantial comments and the editors for their support in the process. The author would furthermore like to thank the research team behind the Greenland Perspectives Survey and Post. Doc. Gustav Agneman for sharing data. Lastly, I would like to thank supervisor Professor Maria Ackrén and co-supervisor Professor Morten Frederiksen as well as colleagues at Ilisimatusarfik, the Wealth of the Arctic Group of Experts (WAGE) network, and Jo Saglie at Institutt for Samfunnsforskning for their constructive reviews and feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/2154896X.2024.2342108
Notes
1 Helliwell et al., World Happiness Report 2022; OECD, OECD Guidelines on Measuring Trust.
2 Haerpfer et al., “World Values Survey Time-Series (1981–2022) Cross-National Data-Set”.
3 Rothstein, “Quality of Government”; Martinangeli et al., “Institutional Quality Causes Generalized Trust”; Dinesen and Sønderskov, “Quality of Government and Social Trust”.
4 Høiris, Marquardt, and Andreasen, Magt og autoritet i Grønland [Power and Authority in Greenland].
5 Heinrich, “Grønlandsk-danske forhandlinger 1946–1979 [Greenlandic-Danish Negotiations 1946 – 1979]”.
6 Minor et al., “Greenland Perspectives Survey”.
7 Newton and Zmerli, “Three Forms of Trust and Their Association”; Wollebæk and Segaard, Sosial kapital i Norge.
8 Bauer and Freitag, Measuring Trust, 16
9 Uslaner, The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust; Delhey and Newton, “Who Trusts?”
10 Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness; Dinesen and Sønderskov, Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust, 2017.
11 Möllering, “Process Views of Trusting and Crises”.
12 Lyon, Möllering, and Saunders, Handbook of Research Methods on Trust.
13 Uslaner, The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust.
14 Frederiksen, “Relational Trust”.
15 Frederiksen, “Trust in the Face of Uncertainty”.
16 Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”.
17 Norris, ‘The Conceptual Framework of Political Support’.
18 Dinesen and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust,” June 2015., 552.
19 Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov, ‘Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust’; Bauer and Freitag, Measuring Trust; Reeskens, ‘But Who Are Those “Most People” That Can Be Trusted?’; Delhey, Newton, and Welzel, ‘How General Is Trust in “Most People”?’
20 Wamsler, “Dimensions of Social Trust and National Identity”; Reeskens, ‘But Who Are Those “Most People” That Can Be Trusted?’; Delhey, Newton, and Welzel, ‘How General Is Trust in “Most People”?’.
21 Dinesen and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust,” June 2015.
22 Glanville and Paxton, “How Do We Learn to Trust?”.
23 Tròndheim, “Kinship in Greenland – Emotions of Relatedness”.
24 Glanville and Paxton, “How Do We Learn to Trust?,” 232.
25 Wamsler, “Dimensions of Social Trust and National Identity”; Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”.
26 Uslaner, The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust.
27 Uslaner.
28 Svendsen and Svendsen, Trust, Social Capital and the Scandinavian Welfare State.
29 Wollebæk and Segaard, Sosial kapital i Norge., 12,45
30 Marcussen, Den danske model og globaliseringen [the Danish model and Globalization].
31 Rokkan and Urwin, Economy, Territory, Identity: Politics of West European Peripheries.
32 Frederiksen, Usikker Modernitet [Uncertain Modernity].
33 Martinangeli et al., “Institutional Quality Causes Generalized Trust”; Rothstein, “Quality of Government”; Dinesen and Sønderskov, “Quality of Government and Social Trust”; Rothstein and Stolle, “The State and Social Capital: An Institutional Theory of Generalized Trust”.
34 Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli, Social and Political Trust.
35 Rothstein and Stolle, “The State and Social Capital: An Institutional Theory of Generalized Trust”.
36 Bågenholm et al., The Oxford Handbook of the Quality of Government.
37 Fairbrother et al., “Can Bureaucrats Break Trust?”; Mewes et al., “Experiences Matter”.
38 Wollebæk and Segaard, Sosial kapital i Norge.
39 Fairbrother et al., “Can Bureaucrats Break Trust?”; Mewes et al., “Experiences Matter”.
40 Martinangeli et al., “Institutional Quality Causes Generalized Trust”; Sønderskov and Dinesen, “Trusting the State, Trusting Each Other?”.
41 Rothstein and Stolle, “The State and Social Capital: An Institutional Theory of Generalized Trust”; Sønderskov and Dinesen, “Trusting the State, Trusting Each Other?”; Martinangeli et al., “Institutional Quality Causes Generalized Trust”.
42 Rothstein, “Quality of Government”; Rothstein and Stolle, “The State and Social Capital: An Institutional Theory of Generalized Trust”; Kumlin, The Personal and the Political; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, “The Welfare State and Political Trust”.
43 Transparency International Greenland, “Global Corruption Barometer 2020 - Hovedkonklusioner fra Grønland [Global Corruption Barometer 2020 - Main Conclusions from Greenland]”.
44 Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli, Social and Political Trust.
45 Olsen, I skyggen af kajakkerne : Grønlands politiske historie 1939–79 [In the Shadow of the Kayaks. The Political History of Greenland 1939–79].
46 Peeters and Campos, “Street-Level Bureaucracy in Weak State Institutions’; Nisar and Masood, ‘Bureaucracy and the Other”.
47 Baldacchino and Wivel, Handbook on the Politics of Small States; Peeters and Campos, “Street-Level Bureaucracy in Weak State Institutions”; Corbett, ‘Bureaucratic Capacity’; Wijeweera, “Public Administration in the Small Developing State”.
48 Gustavsson and Stendahl, “National Identity, a Blessing or a Curse?”; Lenard and Miller, Trust and National Identity.
49 Wamsler, “Dimensions of Social Trust and National Identity”; Gustavsson and Stendahl, “National Identity, a Blessing or a Curse?”; Lenard and Miller, Trust and National Identity.
50 Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”; Dinesen and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”, June 2015.
51 Dinesen and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”, June 2015.
52 Hwang, “Do Minorities Trust Less?”.
53 Gustavsson and Stendahl, “National Identity, a Blessing or a Curse?”; Lenard and Miller, Trust and National Identity.
54 Gustavsson and Stendahl, “National Identity, a Blessing or a Curse?”.
55 Kleemann, “Greenland in Figures 2023”.
56 Kleemann.
57 Agneman and Chevrot-Bianco, “Market Participation and Moral Decision-Making”.
58 Delhey and Newton, “Who Trusts?”; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy.
59 Helliwell et al., World Happiness Report 2022.
60 Helliwell et al., Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy; Delhey and Newton, “Who Trusts?”
61 Wamsler, “Dimensions of Social Trust and National Identity”.
62 Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”.
63 Gad, “Grønlandsk Identitet [Greenlandic Identity]”; Jacobsen, “Den Grønlandske Identitetsdiskurs” Betydning for Grønlands Selvstyres Udenrigspolitiske Handlerum [Significance of the Greenlandic Identity Discourse for the Foreign Policy Arena of the Government of Greenland]’.
64 Nornild, “Grønlandsk Kirkeret i et Retshistorisk Perspektiv – Fra Hans Egede Til i Dag [Greenlandic Church Law in a Judicial Historical Perspective – From Hans Egede to the Present]”.
65 Olsen, I skyggen af kajakkerne : Grønlands politiske historie 1939–79 [In the Shadow of the Kayaks. The Political History of Greenland 1939–79].
66 Adolphsen, “Hvad er magt – i Grønland [What is Power in Greenland]”.
67 Lennert, “The Administrative Context of the Greenland Primary and Lower Secondary School System – a Governance System Misaligned with Learning”.
68 Glomsrød, Duhaime, and Aslaksen, The Economy of the North 2020 ECONOR.
69 Minor et al., “Greenland Perspectives Survey”.
70 Minor et al.
71 Frederiksen, Gundelach, and Skovgaard Nielsen, Survey: design, stikprøve, spørgeskema, analyse. [Survey: Design, Sample, Questionnaire, Analysis]
72 Agneman, “How economic expectations shape preferences for national independence: Evidence from Greenland,”appendix A.
73 Winship and Radbill, “Sampling Weights and Regression Analysis”.
74 Winship and Radbill; Solon, Haider, and Wooldridge, “What Are We Weighting For?”.
75 Rothstein and Stolle, “The State and Social Capital: An Institutional Theory of Generalized Trust”.
76 Frederiksen, “Den Danske Værdiundersøgelse 1981–2017 [The Danish Values Survey 1981 – 2017]”.
77 European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC), “ESS9 - Integrated File, Edition 3.2”.
78 Frederiksen, Usikker Modernitet [Uncertain Modernity].
79 Haerpfer et al., “World Values Survey Time-Series (1981–2022) Cross-National Data-Set”.
80 Nilsson and Møller, “Tillit och förtroende bland sametingsväljarna i Norge och Sverige”.
81 Hwang, “Do Minorities Trust Less?”.
82 Frederiksen, Gundelach, and Skovgaard Nielsen, Survey: design, stikprøve, spørgeskema, analyse [Survey: Design, Sample, Questionnaire, Analysis].
83 Helliwell et al., World Happiness Report 2022.
84 Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust.
85 Stein, Buck, and Bjørnå, “The Centre – Periphery Dimension and Trust in Politicians”.
86 Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics”.
87 Denmark, Lov (Nr. 139–1908) Om Styrelse Af Kolonierne i Grønland m.m. Amalienborg, Den 27 de Maj 1908 [Law No. 139–1908 on the Governance of Colonies in Greenland Etc., Amalienborg, 17th of May 1908].
88 Rink et al., “The Influence of Kinship Networks and Family Relationships on Pregnancy Dynamics in North Greenland”; Tròndheim, “Kinship in Greenland – Emotions of Relatedness”; Berliner and Enghoff, Collaboration, Dialogue and Trust: Art and Social Resilience in Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland; Agneman and Chevrot-Bianco, “Market Participation and Moral Decision-Making”.
89 Glanville and Paxton, “How Do We Learn to Trust?”.
90 Ravn-Højgaard, “Micro Media Systems”.
91 Kumlin, The Personal and the Political.
92 Sønderskov and Dinesen, “Trusting the State, Trusting Each Other?”; Kumlin, The Personal and the Political; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, “The Welfare State and Political Trust”.
93 Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust”.
94 Høiris, Marquardt, and Andreasen, Magt og autoritet i Grønland [Power and Authority in Greenland].
95 Frederiksen, “Distrust and Mistrust”.
96 Selle, Semb, and Strømsnes, “Sosial Kapital Blant Norske Samer”.
97 Möllering, “Process Views of Trusting and Crises”; Frederiksen, “Relational Trust”.
98 Bourdieu, Distinction.
99 Lyon, Möllering, and Saunders, Handbook of Research Methods on Trust.
100 Hayward et al., “Addressing the Need for Indigenous and Decolonized Quantitative Research Methods in Canada”.
101 Bryman, Social Research Methods, 178.
102 Winship and Radbill, “Sampling Weights and Regression Analysis”.
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112442/MPU-social-sciences.png"})