Diversity and Community Trust in Swedish Local Communities

Abstract

This paper analyses the effect of immigration-related diversity on different forms of trust through the hierarchical analysis of three levels of approximately 5,000 respondents nested in over 800 neighbourhoods and 33 municipalities. The data set is based on a unique survey that was specially designed to measure different forms of trust and to test the effects of context.Building on previous findings about the effect of diversity on various forms of trust in Sweden, we discuss three mechanisms through which diversity may drive down community trust in diverse settings -dissimilarity, perceptions of unfairness and asymmetry of information and norms -and explore these empirically. In particular, we examine under which conditions asymmetry of information and norms and perceptions of unfairness affect community trust, and how it interacts with diversity. Our analysis reveals that norm asymmetry and perceptions of unfairness affect community trust negatively but the negative effects are more pronounced in the most diverse local communities.

When state‐level institutions cannot tell the whole story: An inquiry into municipal variations in quality of government

“…Also, the results show, in line with previous studies of Sweden, that diversity in the municipal population (i.e. lower levels of homogeneity) is correlated with lower levels of community trust (Wallman Lundåsen & Wollebaek 2013). This, in combination with the perceived violations of the principle of impartiality by the local public administration, increases the sense of unequal opportunities, where some of the residents of the local community are perceived to be treated more favorably by the local public administrations.…”

“…At the municipal level, we use administrative level data from Statistics Sweden as control variables. These variables include population size, ethnic diversity within the population (Herfindahl index) (Wallman Lundåsen & Wollebaek, 2013), and economic inequality (Gini index) (Uslaner, 2002). For descriptive statistics see Table A1 in the Appendix.…”

“…The ambition to move beyond cross-national comparisons and highlight nontrivial within-country differences regarding violations of the norm of impartiality is a most welcome initiative. This literature is clearly relevant for, and has the potential to theoretically inform, many of the recent interesting studies on corruption and trust in local government in low-corrupt countries (see, for instance, Bergh, Fink, & Öhrvall, 2017;Masters & Graycar, 2016;Kristinsson, 2015;Wallman Lundåsen & Wollebaek, 2013;Dahlström & Sundell, 2013;Jiménez, 2009;Erlingsson, Bergh, & Sjölin, 2009;Lidström, 2008). That said, to be able to make the claim that impartiality of subnational institutions is responsible for variations in social trust among citizens, empirical analyses need to be more sensitive to varying constitutional designs of the countries that are analyzed, so that relevant institutions are matched with the level of analysis where data are collected.…”

Solid or Flexible? Social Trust from Early Adolescence to Young Adulthood

“…However, it should be added that the items used in the current study are similar to those used in numerous studies and international surveys. A final potential limitation concerns whether findings from our sample can be generalized to a wider population (Wallman Lundåsen & Wollebæk ). The data used in this study come from a community‐based sample in a medium‐sized Swedish city.…”

Nordic Research on Political Behaviour

“…The high level of social capital in the Nordic region has been explained by the universalism in welfare programmes (Kumlin & Rothstein 2005), the high level of income equality (Gustavsson & Jordahl 2008) and the low levels of corruption (Rothstein & Uslaner 2005). Recent works have moved towards studying the impact of growing ethnic diversity on social trust (Ivarsflaten & Strømsnes 2013;Lolle & Torpe 2011;Wallman-Lundåsen & Wollebaek 2013) and the quality of government institutions (Svallfors 2013).…”