HLEG thematic workshop on Measuring Trust and Social Capital, 10 June 2016, Paris, France. More information at: www.oecd.org/statistics/measuring-economic-social-progress/hleg-workshop-on-measuring-trust-and-social-capital-2016.htm

1. Determinants of Trust in Institutions –
Trust in Others
Bo Rothstein
Blavatnik School of Government
and
Nuffield College
University of Oxford

2. What type of institutions do
people trust?
 Trust in “government”?
 Governments are and do many things
 Considerable variation between different
parts
 Americans seems to ”hate the government”
but they love “social security”

3. USA vs Nordic countries
 Should it be ”the responsibility of government to
provide a job for everyone that wants one”.
Nordic countries 65%, USA 50%
 Should it be ”the responsibility for the
government to provide a decent standard of
living for the unemployed”. Nordic countries
81%, USA 50%
 Should the government ”spend (much) more on
old age pensions”: Nordic countries 54%, USA
64%
 Source: ISSP 2007

4. Trust in Swedish Institutions
 National Tax Administration + 64
 Public Health Service + 56
 National Enforcement Authority + 42
 National Pension Agency + 29
 The Government + 28
 The Parliament + 21
 National School Agency + 3
 National Social Insurance - 3
 National Employment Service - 35

5. Variations in institutional quality in regions in
Italy

6. Input vs Output
 Thirty years of surveys in Sweden about trust in
institutions
 People tend to trust “input” institutions (political
parties, unions, parliament, cabinet) much less
than “output” institutions (police, courts, public
health service, public pension, tax authorities)
 Why?
 Partisan institutions are trusted less than
institutions based on impartiality

7. What creates political legitimacy?
 Bruce Gilley: The Right to Rule
 "General governance (a composite of the rule of law,
control of corruption and government effectiveness)
clearly has a large, even overarching, importance in
global citizen evaluation of the legitimacy of states” …. “it
is notable that democratic rights, while certainly
qualifying as one of the most important causes of
legitimacy, turn out to be roughly on par with welfare
gains, and both of these are far less important than good
governance”.

8. Legitimacy (cont.)
 Quality of Government ”has a very strong
and independent effect on all levels of
regime support”
 ”It is Quality of Government and the
impartial treatment on the output side of
the political system, and not electoral
democracy, that creates regime
legitimacy”
(Torbjörn Gjefsen 2012)

9. Determinants for the differences in
social trust?
 The societal approach (voluntary associations,
civil society).
 "perhaps most important and most surprising,
none of the four measures of voluntary activity
stood up to statistical tests, in spite of the
importance attached to them in a large body of
writing, from de Tocqueville onwards",
 Delhey, Jan, and Kenneth Newton. 2004. Social Trust: Global
Pattern or Nordic Exceptionalism. Berlin:Wissenschaftszentrum.

10. The Corruption – Trust theory
Fisch Stinkt vom Koph her”

11. Dysfunctional government institutions
breaks social trust
 Corruption
 Clientilism
 Nepotism
 Authoritarian
 Particularistic
 Offensive bureaucratic intrusion
 Ethnic etc. discrimination

12. Theory: The causal mechanisms
 Inference 1: From public officials to ”people in
general”
 Inference 2: From ”people in general” who are
forced to/choose to participate in corruption
etc. to ”other people”
 Inference 3: Från oneself (who is forced to
participate in corruption etc.) to ”people in
general”
 Social Trust – An evaluation of the moral
standard of your society

13. Empirical studies
 “Making and Breaking Social Capital: The Impact of Welfare State
Institutions”, Staffan Kumlin & Bo Rothstein, Comparative Political
Studies 2005
 Rothstein, Bo, and Dietlind Stolle. 2008. "The State and Social
Capital: An Institutional Theory of Generalized Trust." Comparative
Politics 40(441-467).
 “Rothstein, Bo, and Daniel Eek. 2009. "Political Corruption and
Social Trust - An Experimental Approach." Rationality and Society
21(1):81-112.
 Nannestad, Peter, Gert T. Svendsen, Peter T. Dinesen, and Kim. M.
Sonderskov. 2014. "Do Institutions or Culture Determine the Level of
Social Trust? The Natural Experiment of Migration from Non-
western to Western Countries." Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies 40:544-565.
 Sønderskov, Kim M. , and Peter T. Dinesen. 2016. "Trusting the
State, Trusting Each Other? The Effect of Institutional Trust on
Social Trust." Political Behavior 38 (1):179-202.

14. Conclusions
 Social trust in generated (and destroyed) from
“above”
 The most important factor for generating social
trust is high quality government institutions at the
“output” side
 People do not conflate trust in these institutions
with their support for current government
 Such institutions are based on the basic ethical
norm of impartiality in the exercise of public
power