Francisco Herreros

The State and the Development of Social Trust

The role of the state in the promotion of social or generalized trust is one of the most important ongoing topics in social capital research. We suggest that the state can play a positive role in the creation of social trust as a third-party enforcer of private agreements. This positive effect depends on the efficacy of the state. We also argue that the effects of the state on social trust will be unevenly distributed among majoritarian and minoritarian ethnic groups. These hypotheses are tested using the European Social Survey (2002—03) and confirmed for a dataset of 22 European countries.

Social Trust, Social Capital and Perceptions of Immigration

Analyses of social capital and immigration have stressed the negative impact that culturally diverse societies have for the development of social trust. Ethnic heterogeneity, according to these studies, is associated with lower levels of social trust. However, social trust has not been studied as an independent variable in order to explain attitudes towards immigration. This article argues that societies with high levels of social capital facilitate the integration of immigrants because those members with high levels of social trust will tend to have more positive attitudes towards immigration. This hypothesis is empirically tested in a cross-country multi-level empirical analysis for sixteen European countries, drawing on the 2002–3 European Social Survey. This analysis shows that, regardless of the impact of other individual-level variables and contextual variables such as levels of unemployment or percentage of foreign population, those with high social capital do exhibit more positive attitudes towards immigration than the rest of the population.

Political Support Taking Into Account the Institutional Context

The analysis of the causes of political support for political institutions has been focused either on one-case studies that stress the relevance of individual variables or cross-national studies that stress the role of institutions. In this article, the authors suggest that to understand the logic of political support, it is necessary to combine both types of explanations. Using evidence from 17 European countries of the 2002 to 2003 European Social Survey data set, the authors show that the effect of the performance of the institution on political support is higher in majoritarian democracies, where the attribution of responsibility for policy outcomes is clear, than in proportional democracies. They also show that the effect of ideology on political support depends on the type of democracy: Those citizens ideologically far from the government will show higher levels of political support in proportional democracies than in majoritarian ones.

Peace of Cemeteries: Civil War Dynamics in Postwar States’ Repression

This article analyzes whether state repression in post—civil war situations can be explained by dynamics associated with previous civil wars. It claims that in post—civil war situations the state can more easily resort to indiscriminate repression against social groups, relying on information related to the civil war. Two civil war dynamics are tested: preemptive indiscriminate violence to eliminate opposition by the defeated population and retaliation for crimes committed during the war. Using data from the first decade of the Francoist regime in Spain, the author found that civil war dynamics, and not actual dissent, explain most of the country’s postwar violence.

The State and the Creation of an Environment for the Growing of Trust

There is a growing interest in the literature on trust and social capital in the analysis of the role of the State in the creation and destruction of trust. According to some authors, the intervention of the State crowds out trust instead of fostering it. In this article, the author shows that the intervention of the State as a third-party enforcer of agreements does not crowd out expectations of trust, but it does not create trust either. However, it is further shown that the absence or inefficacy of the State does destroy trust. This last idea is illustrated with a classical case in the social capital literature: Southern Italy in the modern period.

The state counts: State efficacy and the development of trust

Most analyses of the relationship between state institutions and interpersonal trust claim either that the state crowds out trust or that it helps to create trust, acting as a third-party enforcer of agreements. Actually, the relationship between the state and trust is much more complex. This article presents a theoretical model that predicts how trust will evolve in highly efficacious and low-efficacious states. Based on priors about other people’s trustworthiness determined by educational level, the model claims that in low-efficacious states, trust will tend to collapse and education will not have an effect on trust levels. However, as state efficacy grows, education level will explain variations in trust levels. The theoretical predictions are to a great extent confirmed by a multilevel analysis of 47 countries.

Ties that bind: Family relationships and social trust

There have been two main arguments concerning the effects of family relationships on social trust. The first claims that the intensity of the family relationship reduces the capacity of the family members to interact in the outside world, where social uncertainty prevails. The second considers that trust inside the family spills over into trust in strangers. There is a corollary to the first argument: intense family relationships, by reducing social trust, affect community development negatively. In this article, I show, first, that it is the intensity of family relationships, and not trust in the family, that negatively affects social trust, and, second, that there is an interaction effect between trust in the family and state efficacy on social trust. While high trust in the family and low trust in strangers can go together, the relationship is spurious. It is low state efficacy that causes low trust in strangers and, to a lesser extent, high in-family trust. These arguments are tested with a sample of 44 countries from the 2005 wave of World Value Surveys.

Land reform and conflict before the Civil War: landowner response to tenancy reform in 1930s Catalonia: LAND REFORM AND CONFLICT BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

This article studies the impact of insecure property rights on the behaviour of owners of land before the Spanish Civil War. The theoretical literature on land reform argues that legal threats to the status quo determine agrarian organization, with owners selling land and moving to other asset classes or engaging in large‐scale substitution of sharecroppers and tenants with wage labourers. This study, which uses municipal data on tenant evictions in Catalonia in 1934–5, does not find that uncertainty over property rights in the 1930s meant that owners tried to substitute tenants with wage labourers, especially in the case of the controversial rabassa morta contracts on vineyards. Here it is argued that after 40 years of organizational adjustment to shocks related to phylloxera infestations, legal changes, urbanization, and changes in relative prices, by the 1930s the margin for adjustment was small.

The Unintended Consequences of Political Mobilization on Trust

Conflicting theories and mixed empirical results exist on the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust. This article argues that these mixed empirical results might be driven by contextual conditions. We conjecture that political competition could strengthen ethnic saliency and, in turn, salient ethnic identities can activate or intensify in-group trust and depress trust in members of other ethnic groups. We test this conjecture using the move toward secession in Catalonia, Spain. We conduct trust experiments across ethnic lines in Catalonia before and during the secessionist process. After three years of proindependence mobilization in Catalonia, one of the ethnic groups, Spanish speakers living in Catalonia, has indeed increased its in-group trust. This result is robust after a set of individual-level variables are controlled for, but no equivalent result is found in a comparable region, the Basque Country.

Education and trust: A tale of three continents

To date, most research finds education to have a positive effect on trust. Education increases people’s social intelligence, making them better able to distinguish between trustworthy and opportunistic types. Alternatively, education allows people to attain privileged social status, making them more resistant to deceit and exploitation by opportunistic types. In this article we show that this is not always the case. The relationship between education and trust is mediated by state efficacy; where the state is relatively efficacious, trustworthy types largely survive, while the opposite is true with relatively weak states. In weak states, highly educated people should be the least trustful. We empirically demonstrate this theoretical insight with survey data from three continents, Europe and Africa at the extremes and Latin America in the middle. We provide some indirect evidence in favor of social intelligence as the key mechanism linking education and trust.