Economic conditions and social trust climates in Europe over ten years: An ecological analysis of change

ABSTRACT

Two concurrent positions have driven research on the relationship between economic factors and social trust across countries: While some research has shown that unequal wealth distribution leads to poor social trust, other research has argued that social trust is the precondition to a country's economic performance and distribution of economic resources. Using an ecological linear growth model, this study tests these two concurrent positions with data from the first six rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). This study focuses on the links between socio-economic conditions and inclusive social capital climates, i.e. social climates where inclusive attitudes and generalised trust are widely extended to outgroups. Two models are estimated with Bayesian methods and then compared. The results support the hypothesis that the diffusion of inclusive social capital climates can predict the improvement of a country's socio-economic conditions. However, they also support the opposite hypothesis, according to which the improvement of socio-economic conditions is pivotal in creating a climate of trust. Slightly stronger results are found for the latter hypothesis, suggesting that the enhancement of economic conditions and income distribution may be pivotal in reinforcing the social fabric.

KEYWORDS:

• Social trust
• inequality
• trust climates
• income distribution
• social change

ACTION EDITOR:

• Guido Möllering

Acknowledgment

The authors are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial assistance. The authors would also like to thank the members of the Resiliences group at the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (University of Lausanne): Zacharia Bady, Karen Brändle, Guy Elcheroth, Dario Spini, Minja Leko, Mina Rauschenbach, Sandra Penic and Stéphanie Baggio, for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Davide Morselli is Assistant Professor at the Life Course and Inequality Research Center of the University of Lausanne and Senior Researcher at the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research LIVES: Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives. Alongside substantive research on the psycho-social dynamics of social change and the effects of context on individual world-views and attitudes, he has been involved in the implementation of retrospective methods in survey designs to collect biographical data.

Stephanie Glaeser earned her PhD in Social Sciences at University of Lausanne. Her research interests include the links between social trust, cohesion and exclusion.

Notes

1 Iceland was excluded from the sample because of the limited number of rounds, and Turkey and Israel were excluded to focus the research on the European cultural context.

2 For a detailed description of the survey characteristics and procedure, consult the ESS project website (http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/).

3 To allow the computation in Mplus, the GDP was transformed logarithmically.

4 In the LGM terminology, ‘intercept’ and ‘slope’ are the names of two latent factors. The factor loadings of the intercept are fixed at 1, while the factor loadings of the slope are fixed between the first and the subsequent observations (from 0 to 10 in our case). As in the factor analysis, both the intercept and slop have a mean and a variance. The mean intercept represents where the average case starts, and the mean slope represents the average rate of change. For further details, see Stoel et al. (2003).

Additional information

Funding

This publication benefited from the support of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives (NCCR LIVES), which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 51NF40 - 160590].