Predicting Cross-National Levels of Social Trust: Global Pattern or Nordic Exceptionalism?

“Bjornskov 2006; Delhey and Newton 2003, 2005; Freitag and Buhlmann 2009; Glaeser et al. 2000; Newton and Zmerli 2011; Rothstein and Stolle 2008).”

“The alternative forces include associational activity, existential security, functioning institutions, social separations, cultural legacies, and some individual-level characteristics (for an overview of trust-crediting forces, see Delhey & Newton, 2005; Delhey et al., 2011).”

“In a crosscountry analysis of generalized trust, Delhey and Newton (2005) identify ethnic homogeneity, protestantism, good government, national wealth and income equality as the strongest predictors of generalized trust.”

“All these Attributes May Affect the Social Stiffness between Individuals Putting up Barriers to Developing Trust (for Example, Delhey and Newton, 2005; Leigh, 2006).”

“9 explain the higher level of trust in Scandinavia (Delhey and Newton 2005).”

“Social trust is defined as general trust belief that people will not deliberately or knowingly harm others, and if possible they will avoid it and will look after social interests [27].”

“…Delhey and Newton examine six types of explanations (in the guise of 35 variables) in their empirical analysis of aggregate-level social trust in 60 countries (Delhey & Newton, 2005) and six theories of social trust in a corresponding analysis at the individual level (Delhey & Newton, 2003).”

“Political trust, or trust in (government) institutions, is generally thought to be closely linked to general or interpersonal trust (Delhey and Newton, 2005; Inglehart, 1997; Putnam, 1993; Uslaner, 2002).”

“This egalitarian aspect of the JL, according to Uslaner’s theorizing, helps to explain the findings by Uslaner and others (Uslaner, 2002; Rothstein and Stolle, 2003; Delhey and Newton, 2005; Nannestad, 2008) that the levels of generalized trust in the Scandinavian societies are remarkably high.”

“…personality traits (Dinesen, Nørgaard, and Klemmensen 2014; Freitag and Bauer 2016), political–institutional environments (Bjørnskov 2007; Dinesen 2013; Delhey and Newton 2005; Freitag and Bühlmann 2009; Herreros 2004; Paxton 2002; Robbins 2012a, 2012b), and various sociodemographic…”

“…a good case of a high-trust organization, its context must be considered: Denmark is renowned for being a high-trust country (Torfing and Bentzen 2022; Delhey and Newton 2005; Andreasson 2017) with strong cooperative traditions and short power distances (Chloupkova, Svendsen, and Svendsen 2003).”

“As mentioned above, Delhey & Newton (2005) ends up with an overall model in which ethnic homogeneity and Protestantism are the two independent variables and good governanceiii, national wealth (GDP) and income equality (gini coefficient) are the intervening variablesiv.”

“At the societal level, social trust, is also an attribute of a country, or a given cultural group, thus enabling comparisons (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Newton, 2007; Newton & Norris, 2000).”

“To which extent we have optimism in the future, which is indeed important for trust (Delhey and Newton 2005; Rothstein and Uslaner 2005), might be harmed by high perceived inequality.”

“In contrast, Delhey and Newton (2005) found that countries that are predominantly Protestant or have a significant Protestant minority exhibit higher levels of trust than Catholic countries, which implies that religion is a good instrument for informal institutions (social capital).”

“In brief, wealthier societies are more likely to meet the basic needs of their members, and thus, individuals should be more willing to take risks by trusting strangers (Delhey and Newton 2005; Paxton 2007).”

“58 Delhey and Newton 2005; Rothstein 2005.”

“…a positive association between general social trust – that is, the extent to which an individual trusts other people in society – and political trust (Delhey & Newton, 2005) and that people with higher social trust also tend to think that institutions such as the police, the court, and the civil…”

“This is the view, advocated by political scientists such as Rothstein and Uslaner (2006), Delhey and Newton (2005) , Newton (1997) and Newton and Norris (2000), that it is effective government that enables social trust and association membership to appear.”

“Trust measured in this way varies markedly between populations (Bond et al. 2004; Delhey & Newton 2005; Knack & Keefer 1997), is predictive of prosocial behaviours (Balliet & Van Lange 2013; Gachter et al. 2004), and relates to crime rates rates (Kennedy et al. 1998; Roh & Lee 2013), and the…”

“…by Delhey and Newton (2003, 2005) showed that societies differ in terms of their level of social trust, defined as “the belief that others will not deliberately or knowingly do us harm, if they can avoid it, and will look after our interests, if that is possible” (Delhey and Newton 2005, p. 311.).”

“…beneficial and desirable externalities of generalized trust, the scholarly research aiming at disentangling the roots of trust has proliferated (Delhey and Newton 2005; Bjørnskov 2007; Nannestad 2008).1 A particular interest in the origins of trust has been dedicated to the trust-generating…”

“Because social hierarchy correlates with minority backgrounds, ethnic diversity has been argued to affect social contacts in a similar vein (Delhey and Newton, 2005; Hooghe et al., 2009).”

“Ethnic and religious diversity can decrease social cohesion or generalized social trust (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2002; Delhey & Newton, 2005; Hero, 2003; Nannestad, 2008; Putnam, 2007).”

“Studies relating income inequality and racial diversity to social capital have focused on effects at the country (Delhey & Newton, 2003, 2005), regional (Helliwell, 1996; Johnston & Soroka, 1999; Putnam, 1993), city (Alesina & Ferrara, 2000; Costa & Kahn, 2003), and neighborhood levels (Leigh,…”

“For an analysis of social trust in data for 60 countries collected from wave II for 1989–1993 and wave III for 1995–1997 of the WVS using two-point item see Delhey and Newton (2005).”

“Gheorghiu et al. (2009) demonstrated that, across 31 European nations, individualism (operationalized via two of Schwartz’s value dimensions) is more likely to foster generalized social trust among people than collectivism.”

“According to Delhey and Newton (2005), people have a tendency to associate with, socialize with, and be more comfortable with people who appear similar to themselves.”

“aspects of culture [9] and lower levels of trust in these countries [10].”

“Although there are many indicators that apparently show a steady decline of social capital these evidences have been disputed (Delhey & Newton, 2005).”

“Trust varies across cultures (Branzei, Vertinsky, & Camp, 2007; Delhey & Newton, 2005; Yamagishi, Cook, & Watabe, 1998).”

“Empirically, the quality of political institutions and public services has repeatedly shown to be positively correlated with national levels of trust (Delhey and Newton, 2005; Foster and Frieden, 2017; Nguyen, 2017).”

“Among other things, recent research has shown that citizens in countries with greater ethnic heterogeneity and/or income inequality trust each other less (Delhey and Newton, 2005; Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005; Putnam, 2007; Gustavsson and Jordahl, 2008).”

“…between the two in three steps: First, various studies have provided evidence that cultural heterogeneity leads to a lower level of trust, where Delhey and Newton (2005) use social divisions as the measure, while others use ethnicity heterogeneity (Knack, 2003; Knack & Keefer, 1997; Zak &…”

“Not surprisingly, comparative studies found that Chileans exhibit persistent and remarkably low social and political trust (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Mattes & Moreno, 2018).”

“…socio-economic correlates – that people living in Nordic countries (in our sample, Denmark, Finland and Sweden) and the Netherlands consistently display the highest social capital levels in Western Europe (e.g. Adam, 2008; Arts and Halman, 2004; Delhey and Newton, 2005; Mascherini et al., 2011).”

“It is generally considered that the characteristics of Russian institutions contribute to low levels of generalized trust (Bjørnskov, 2007; Delhey & Newton, 2005; Kuznetsov & Kuznetsova, 2008).”

“The literature on social trust has considered these two types of trust as major sources of social capital and has examined their determinants such as economic equality, homogeneity in ethnic or religious factors, and democracy [18, 24].”

“Lastly, citizens living in urban areas tended to trust public institutions more, corroborating earlier works (Delhey and Newton, 2005; Zhong, 2014).”

“…Mechanisms and heterogeneous effects Many studies have documented a negative correlation between income inequality and generalized trust (Delhey and Newton, 2005; Freitag and Bühlmann, 2009; Hooghe et al., 2009; Ichida et al., 2009; Uslaner, 2002; Zak and Knack, 2001; Bjørnskov, 2007) 1…”

“…capital and/or a negative relationship of Catholicism (or hierarchical religions) with social capital has been confirmed in many studies (La Porta et al. 1997, Veenstra 2002, Dehley and Newton 2005, Lam 2006, van Oorschot et al. 2006), although most of these studies have focused on trust only.”

“In empirical research, studies have shown that social capital, defined as generalized trust in other people and access to social networks, is determined by the quality of the governmental institutions rather than the other way around (Delhey and Newton 2005; Rothstein 2005).”

“Factors that impact trust can include time [25, 26], demographics [3, 27, 28], location [29], or specific topic [30, 31].”

“The fact that interpersonal, social and political trust varies signi fi cantly across countries (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Norris, 2011) may thus a ff ect di ff erent immigrant groups ’ readiness to trust police in their new home.”

“Although there is a variety of de fi nitions of trust (Fukuyama, 1996, p. 26; Misztal, 1996, p. 16; Delhey & Newton, 2005, p. 311; Dasgupta 1997, p. 5 in Ostrom, 1998, p. 12; Luhmann, 2000, pp. 1, 27), recent literature distinguishes between three different forms: 1) thick trust, 2) interpersonal or…”

“High levels of racial diversity in neighborhoods have been associated with lower levels of civic participation, cooperation, and trusting attitudes in the US and other countries (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2000; Costa & Kahn, 2003; Newton & Delhey, 2005; Putnam, 2007).”

“…and Newton (2005) Income inequality Gini index (World Bank, 2015) 15.90–73.90 − Rothstein and Uslaner (2005) Ethnic fractionalization Fearon and Laitin (2003) 0.01–1.00 − Delhey and Newton (2005) Biological/environmental correlates Fertility rate World Bank (2015) 1.08–9.22 + Zak and Fakhar…”

“…answer this question requires comparing the average levels of trust across places—these could be national and/or regional—and assessing whether places with greater democratization have higher or lower trust (e.g., see Knack and Keefer 1997; Delhey and Newton 2005; Bjørnskov 2008; Ziller 2015).”