Are Joiners Trusters? A Panel Analysis of Participation and Generalized Trust

Abstract

SummaryAs two sides of the same coin - namely that of social capital - civic engagement and social trust have been conceived of as interrelated concepts. Existing studies examine whether civic participation is causally linked to generalized trust. However, the empirical evidence remains ambiguous: partly due to multidimensional measurement and partly in response to inadequate statistical analyses. The contribution of this paper, which uses the Swiss Household Panel data set between 2002 and 2012, is to analyze the causal relationship between participation in associations and generalized trust. Dynamic Panel Models account for the reciprocity of trust and participation with lagged dependent and lagged endogenous independent variables. The positive results support a causal effect of civic participation on generalized trust and show that joiners are trusters a priori, but also that they become trusters as they join.

Swedish exceptionalism? Investigating the effect of associational involvement on generalized trust with panel data

“…1 Empirical research in general is almost exclusively based on cross-sectional data and, to my knowledge, only four studies use panel data when explicitly addressing this topic. The general conclusions of the latter studies, based on data collected in Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, differ markedly from those based on cross-sectional data (Bekkers, 2012;Claibourn & Martin, 2000;Van Ingen & Bekkers, 2015; but see Botzen, 2015). Overall, in panel data-based investigations, the reported effects are nonexistent, substantially small, and/or non-lasting.…”

“…6 Compared with prior panel data studies, in which the time between waves varies from one to nine years, the corresponding time here was comparatively short; approximately 1.5 years (cf. Bekkers, 2012;Botzen, 2015;Claibourn & Martin, 2000;Van Ingen & Bekkers, 2015).…”

Volunteering and political participation are differentially associated with eudaimonic and social well-being across age groups and European countries

“…It has been argued that generalized trust and voluntary participation, which involves cooperating with (initial) strangers and helping strangers, are mutually reinforcing [45,46]. However, international findings on the effects of voluntary participation on generalized trust are mixed [47][48][49][50][51][52].…”

Introduction

“…These questions go beyond whether citizens trust too much or not enough and call for a new debate about the terms of political trust, which have tended to be rather lazily defined by liberal democracies. Academic literature is replete with empirical studies about how much people (dis)trust politicians and journalists (Birch and Allen, 2010; Brants, 2013; Whiteley et al, 2016), which citizens are the most and least likely to be trusting (Botzen, 2015; Koivula et al, 2017; Van Ingen and Bekkers, 2015) and institutional strategies designed to ‘restore’ political trust (Fledderus, 2015; Moynihan and Soss, 2014; OECD, 2017). These are all valuable, but do not in themselves address the normative question: What kind of political truths should we trust and why?…”