Determinants of trust in Turkey

ABSTRACT

International survey results reveal that Turkey is an extreme example of a distrustful society. A very high level of distrust in the country is not only a bottleneck for its socio-economic development but also for a healthy dialogue between different groups in the society. This paper studies micro-level survey data from 2012 to analyze the determinants of different trust types – namely, interpersonal, group and political trust, with respect to various individual characteristics, identity preferences, ethnic background and voting behaviors of respondents. The analysis suggests that political behavior has an impact in polarizing the society. Moreover, ‘citizenship of Turkey’ is seen as not a proper overarching identity, as it does not have a positive impact on either group or interpersonal trust. When the effects of other individual characteristics are analyzed, it is observed that the level of income and education are significant factors in determining all types of trust discussed in this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• diversity
• ethnicity
• identity
• group trust
• political trust
• Turkey

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank KONDA Research and Consultancy for their generosity in providing the micro-level data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Aysegul Kayaoglu is an Assistant Professor in Economics at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Economics in 2014 from Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Besides, she is a graduate of the European Doctoral Program for Quantitative Economics in 2014 during which she also studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK, where she was a teaching fellow in the Departments of Economics and Management between 2011 and 2014. Her main research interests are applied development economics, population economics, political economy and informal institutions.

ORCiD

Aysegul Kayaoglu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1484-184X

Notes

1 Uslaner (2008b: 290) states that ‘generalized trust represents a sense of social solidarity, a belief that other people, especially people unlike yourself, are part of your moral community’. Trust can also be defined as ‘the mutual confidence that no party to an exchange will exploit the other’s vulnerability’ (Sabel 1993: 1133).

2 The concept of ‘trust’ in this text is in line with its definition in Putnam (1995) and is regarded as one of the facets of social capital. Moreover, the survey question that we used to measure the trust variable in the empirical analysis section is the most widely used in the literature and is argued to provide a measure of ‘moralistic trust’ which is ‘a value that we learn early in life and that is largely resistant to bad experiences – or good ones’ (Uslaner 2002).

3 National identity is distinct from ‘nationalism’ and it is used here as a type of belonging to a state in terms of citizenship.

4 They test Fukuyama’s hypotheses of low-trust vs. high-trust societies using a data on interpersonal/social trust in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Australia and Thailand. They also extend Fukuyama’s work ‘by identifying the population groups within each country who have higher or lower trust, thereby not assuming homogeneity within each country’ (Ward et al. 2014: 3).

5 Fukuyama (1996), in his seminal work, divides countries into two groups, namely; high-trust and low-trust ones. He argues that in societies where familial piety is strong, there will be less trust toward people outside of the family. Therefore, according to his view, out-group ties will be weaker as the internal ties get stronger. He shows examples from different parts of the world to support his hypothesis. He, for example, argues that Taiwan and Hong Kong are examples of ‘low-trust societies' and Japan, the US, the UK and Germany are cases of high-trust societies.

6 Data was collected in 12 regions. In total, 29 provinces, 93 districts and 150 neighborhoods/villages were visited and 2528 individuals interviewed. The sample is prepared by stratifying the data on population and education levels of neighborhoods and villages based upon the Address-Based Population Registration System and general election results of 12 June 2011.

7 One can argue that this also leads AKP voters to trust other AKP voters more than voters of other parties, which would polarize the society further. This issue should be investigated in further research.

8 The term ‘Turk’ is used here as an ethnic category but not as an overarching identity for many different ethnic backgrounds. Although there are many academics who argue that ‘Turk’ is an ethnic identity which usually refers to citizens of Turkey who are not Kurds and Arabs, there are also some academics who strongly argue that the term ‘Turk’ is a political umbrella identity terminology and a device of assimilationist identity politics to be used for many ethnic groups in Turkey, including Kurds and Arabs. The basis for this argument comes from the Ottoman ‘millet’ system, which focused on the Muslim identity of many different ethnic groups and classified them under one overarching identity definition that was ‘İslam milleti’. This term is replaced with ‘Türk milleti’ after the 1920s. For details see, Aktürk (2013).

9 These values are very similar to the 2011 General Elections results.

10 The process was cut off in 2015.

11 For the full story, see http://www.dw.com/tr/dış-mihrakların-oyunu/a-16884450.