Henar Criado

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.

Bullets and votes: Public opinion and terrorist strategies

There is an increasing number of analyses of the effects of terrorism, especially its impact on public opinion. Most of these analyses are focused on the effects of terrorist strategies and attacks on public opinion in general. This article analyzes an important but usually neglected question in this literature: the effects of terrorist strategies on the vote for parties that support the terrorist organization. It uses data referred to the case of the Basque terrorist group ETA and its attached political movement. ETA is one of the most enduring terrorist groups in the world, and during the last three decades, its strategy has combined violence with the convening of truces. The article shows how terrorist strategies, especially the convening of truces and negotiating with the government, significantly increase public support for the terrorist organization. Once the terrorist group has declared a truce and negotiations with the government are under way, the terrorists’ constituency has an incentive to increase its mobilization in favour of the terrorist group. With higher levels of support, the terrorist group has a stronger bargaining position, and, therefore, it becomes more likely to attain its demands.

What Makes Terrorism Salient? Terrorist Strategies, Political Competition, and Public Opinion

This article analyzes the determinants of terrorism saliency in public opinion. It is usually assumed that after a terrorist attack, terrorism becomes automatically salient. However, this assumption is only true in those countries where terrorist attacks are exceptional events. In democracies that have suffered domestic terrorism for decades, the evolution of terrorism saliency does not only depend on the frequency or intensity of terrorist attacks. In this article it is claimed that the tactics carried out by terrorist groups (the type of victim, especially) and the dynamics of political competition (especially the ideology of the incumbent) are also factors that explain the evolution of terrorism saliency. The article also analyzes how these two factors interact with citizens’ predispositions to explain variation in their reactions to terrorist threat. The empirical test relies on a novel database from monthly public opinion surveys in Spain from 1993 to 2012.

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.