Kenneth Newton

Trust, social capital, civil society, and democracy

The importance of trust has long been emphasised by social and political theorists from Locke and Tocqueville to Putnam and civil society theorists. However, individual survey data casts substantial doubt on this powerful tradition of thought. There is little evidence of (1) an overlap between social and political trust, (2) a syndrome of trust and membership of voluntary organizations, and (3) the existence of trusting/distrusting dispositions among individuals. However, at the aggregate national level there is evidence to support the theory, and the author concludes that the classic theory is correct but needs modification and qualification.

Social Capital and Democracy

Social capital is in danger of going the way of political culture—a potentially powerful concept that is given many different meanings by many different people for many different purposes. This article starts by picking out three different aspects or dimensions of the concept—norms (especially trust), networks, and consequences. It then considers three models of social capital and the forms of trust and democracy associated with them. Finally it discusses the role of voluntary associations as a foundation for social capital, arguing that their importance may be overstated in the classical Tocquevillean model of the 19th century, and that, in any case, modern democracy may be increasingly based on different forms of trust and association.

Who trusts?: The origins of social trust in seven societies

This article identifies six main theories of the determinants of social trust, and tests them against survey data from seven societies, 1999-2001. Three of the six theories of trust fare rather poorly and three do better. First and foremost, social trust tends to be high among citizens who believe that there are few severe social conflicts and where the sense of public safety is high. Second, informal social networks are associated with trust. And third, those who are successful in life trust more, or are more inclined by their personal experience to do so. Individual theories seem to work best in societies with higher levels of trust, and societal ones in societies with lower levels of trust. This may have something to do with the fact that our two low trust societies, Hungary and Slovenia, happen to have experienced revolutionary change in the very recent past, so that societal events have overwhelmed individual circumstances.

How General Is Trust in “Most People”? Solving the Radius of Trust Problem

Generalized trust has become a paramount topic throughout the social sciences, in its own right and as the key civic component of social capital. To date, cross-national research relies on the standard question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Yet the radius problem—that is, how wide a circle of others respondents imagine as “most people”—makes comparisons between individuals and countries problematic. Until now, much about the radius problem has been speculation, but data for 51 countries from the latest World Values Survey make it possible to estimate how wide the trust radius actually is. We do this by relating responses to the standard trust question to a new battery of items that measures in-group and out-group trust. In 41 out of 51 countries, “most people” in the standard question predominantly connotes out-groups. To this extent, it is a valid measure of general trust in others. Nevertheless, the radius of “most people” varies considerably across countries; it is substantially narrower in Confucian countries and wider in wealthy countries. Some country rankings on trust thus change dramatically when the standard question is replaced by a radius-adjusted trust score. In cross-country regressions, the radius of trust matters for civic attitudes and behaviors because the assumed civic nature of trust depends on a wide radius.

Mass Media Effects: Mobilization or Media Malaise?

According to some, the modern mass media have a malign effect on modern democracy, tending to induce political apathy, alienation, cynicism and a loss of social capital – in a word, ‘mediamalaise’. Some theorists argue that this is the result of media content, others that it is the consequence of the form of the media, especially television. According to others, the mass media, in conjunction with rising educational levels, help to inform and mobilize people politically, making them more knowledgeable and understanding. This study investigates the mobilization and mediamalaise hypotheses, and finds little to support the latter. Reading a broadsheet newspaper regularly is strongly associated with mobilization, while watching a lot of television has a weaker association of the same kind. Tabloid newspapers and general television are not strongly associated with measures of mediamalaise. It seems to be the content of the media, rather than its form which is important.

Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.

Three forms of trust and their association

This article investigates the relationships between particular social trust, general social trust, and political trust and tests a variety of political, social-psychological, and social capital theories of them. This sort of research has not been carried out before because until the World Values Survey of 2005–07 there has been, to our knowledge, no comparative survey that includes measures of particular and other forms of trust. The new data challenge a common assumption that particular social trust is either harmful or of little importance in modern democracies and shows that it has strong, positive associations with other forms of trust. However, the relationships are not symmetrical and particular social trust seems to be a necessary but not sufficient cause of general social trust, and both forms of social trust appear to be necessary, but not sufficient conditions for political trust. Strong evidence of mutual associations between different forms of trust at both the individual micro level and the contextual macro level supports theories of rainmaker effects, the importance of political institutions, and the significance of social trust for political trust. In more ways than one, social trust, not least of a particular type, seems to have an important bearing on social and political stability.

The National Press and Party Voting in the UK

The difficulty with resolving the classic problem of whether newspapers influence voting patterns is self-selection: readers select a paper to fit their politics, and newspapers select particular types of readers. One way round this chicken-and-egg problem is to compare the voting behaviour of individuals whose politics are reinforced by their paper, with those who are cross-pressured by their paper, and to compare both with those who do not regularly read a paper. Using the British Household Panel study to analyse voting patterns in 1992 and 1997, this study suggest that newspapers have a statistically significant effect on voting, larger for Labour than Conservative sympathizers, and larger for the 1992 than the 1997 election. The broader implications of these findings for British politics and democracy are discussed.

The Radius of Trust Problem Remains Resolved

We welcome van Hoorn’s comment on our ASR article about trust (Delhey, Newton, and Welzel 2011). We appreciate that the author considers our work “an enormous step forward [in] the development of a method for quantifying trust radius” and that our approach fills “an essential gap in the trust literature” (van Hoorn 2014:1259). And we note with contentment that van Hoorn is able to use our method to replicate the most important results. Finally, we are grateful that he has detected a mistake in the later part of our analysis where we apply the trust radius to civicness: van Hoorn helps clarify even more how much the radius of trust matters in shaping a society’s civicness. As much as we acknowledge van Hoorn’s contribution, we wish to stress that the author overstates the importance of his correction. Furthermore, his comment is partly misleading because it blurs the distinction between the major and minor contribution of our research. In the end, van Hoorn’s replication provides striking confirmation of our key contribution, which is that the radius of trust is distinct from the level of trust and that including the radius in measures of generalized trust leads to significantly different—and better—results. These findings are reinforced by van Hoorn’s re-analysis, yet he omits this important conclusion from his presentation. Our 2011 article is concerned with a crucial problem inherent in the standard measure of trust in survey research: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Obviously, who “most people” are remains unspecified in the question. The radius problem thus concerns the circle of “others” whom respondents imagine as “most people.” Is this a small circle of close and familiar others (i.e., ingroups)? Or does it include a rather wide circle of unfamiliar and dissimilar others (i.e., out-groups)? Because the survey question is meant to measure generalized interpersonal trust, a wider understanding of “most people” is assumed. But this is merely an assumption that must be established empirically before researchers can take it for granted. The resulting problems in interpreting trust figures are serious. When conceptions of “most people” vary systematically between nations, the standard trust scores are simply not comparable cross-nationally. This is exactly what our article demonstrates using the fifth wave of data from the World Values Survey (WVS 5 [2009]). More specifically, we made the following claims:

Residential mobility in London: rational choice fairy tale, utopia or reality

Once upon a time, and a good time it was too, there was a faraway country ruled by a wise economist-king called Tiebout who realized that the way to happiness was to organize local public services in market-analogous manner. He did this by dividing local government in Tieboutiana into many competing units, each with its own package of public goods and taxes. In this way citizens (in Tieboutiana they were called consumer-voters) could move between local authorities in search of the public services they wanted at tax rates they thought reasonable.