Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Measuring trust and quality of society in cross national surveys 1 |
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| Convenor | Dr Tadas Leoncikas (Eurofound) |
| Coordinator 1 | Dr Ellen Claes (K.U.Leuven) |
During recent economic downturn, trust in people as well as in institutions seems to be affected in many countries. The changes experienced by societies as an outcome of the economic crisis provide a broad background to reconsider the measurements as well as the links between the trust indicators and a broader set of quality of society measures. While trust and quality of society are contested measurements, but also because they are considered to influence a wide range of economic and political phenomena it is important to improve their methodological understanding especially when cross-national comparisons are concerned.
To improve understanding of the phenomenon of trust and quality of society, as well as to reflect on their measurements, the session invites proposals along the following lines:
- How to assess trends with regard to changing levels of trust in cross-sectional surveys?
- How to interpret the effects of different measurements of trust and quality of society in different countries?
- How measurement of general trust levels can be complemented with understanding of radius of trust?
- What implications for quality of society does trust have as evidenced by links between trust indicators and other quality of life indicators?
- Whether crisis environment is depleting trust or whether and in what circumstances it generates societal solidarity?
Paper givers are invited to send in an abstract of no longer than 800 words.
The European Union is currently struggling with economic difficulties and high levels of national debt. The ongoing economical crises states lead in several nations to processes of social disintegration which manifest themselves at the objective level (e.g. precarization, lack of political participation, social isolation) as well as at the subjective level (e.g. fear of social decline, political disenchantment, lack of political and social trust). Signs of societal discontent can be traced back to certain conditions - namely rapid transformations (in the context of the European integration policy), rising inequalities between societal groups and insecurities (e.g. with regard to cultural diversity). Malaise, seemingly growing in many EU member states, should be seen as a central construct representing a broader and multidimensional approach to understand and evaluate societal embeddedness, feelings of social recognition and social belonging.
The main aim of my contribution is therefore presenting a concept of how societal functioning vs. certain disintegration feelings can be analyzed and measured in comparative research based on survey data (using the database of the ESS). The empirical part of the paper provides a first approach to a multidimensional operationalization of malaise, mainly highlighting societal perceptions and attitudes of citizens within the European Union. It is analyzed if the indicators reflect a reliable measurement and can be seen as cross-culturally equivalent across Europe, which social groups particularly express those disintegration feelings, how the extent of malaise varies between European states and if these vulnerabilities are able to explain critical societal outcomes (ethnocentrism).
There is a growing body of research that suggests that 'social capital' of which institutional trust is a part influences a range of economic and political phenomena. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate on the role that trust has in promoting an inclusive and open society, the likelihood of investment, economic development and general well-being.
This paper contributes to this debate by using data from the Life in Transition Survey, commissioned by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, conducted before and after the economic crisis, to test which quality of life measures are related to high and low levels of trust in society and institutions, using regression techniques. In particular, it will test the hypothesis that trust in institutions is related to confidence in democracy, and explores how levels of trust have been impacted by the crisis, with a focus on the differences between established democracies in Western Europe and the transition countries. It will emphasise the complexity of measuring trust and the challenges inherent in measuring and interpreting levels of trust over time.
An important focus in the literature regarding political trust is the level of political trust. Some authors claim that political trust is declining over the years due to economic or political turmoil. Other researchers are not convinced of this decline in political trust. They state that, when evaluating political trust over time, scholars base themselves on single opinion polls or incomplete time series which cannot lead to correct interpretations.
The establishment of a correct measurement of political trust is therefore important. However, this is a much debated subject. Even though most scholars agree that political trust is a one dimensional construct, some scholars believe it is a multidimensional concept. Before being able to measure political trust, we need to be sure about its form. In this paper, we like to establish whether there is one form of political trust. Once this unidimensionality is confirmed, we evaluate the invariance of the measurement to test if political trust remains stable over time, even during economic and political turbulence.
To examine our research questions we use longitudinal data from the European Social Survey (ESS). Even though the ESS is a cross-country survey, we limit our analyses to the Belgian case. We treat it as a worst case since Belgium has known economic and political instability since 2007. We first conduct a principal component analysis to establish the one-dimensional character of political trust, then we perform single and multiple group factor analyses to test the cross-time invariance of political trust.
In order to assess the health of a society, information on people's perceptions of the functioning and fairness of society is at least as important as the aggregate statistics about this society (GDP rates, Gini coefficients, crime statistics etc.). In this paper, our focus will be on the judgements that people make about the quality of their societies; we study trends across Europe - from 2005 to 2012 - with regards to the levels of trust in major national institutions and other attitudinal measures of societal wellbeing (e.g. satisfaction with public services, perceptions of social tolerance and integration). The data to assess these trends in societal wellbeing will come from the Gallup World Poll, a large-scale repeated cross-sectional survey that allows to study both cross-national differences and emerging trends in societal wellbeing in Europe.
In the second part of the paper, we study the importance of societal wellbeing (still defined in terms of perceptions of the quality of societies) on life satisfaction or individual, subjective wellbeing. The quality of the social context of everyday life is seen as a "driver" of individual wellbeing, and we test how much of the cross-national variation in individual wellbeing can be explained by looking at differences in individuals' perceptions of societal wellbeing. We use multilevel models, incorporating multiple waves of comparative survey data (2005 to 2012), and treat individual wellbeing as a function of individuals' characteristics and circumstances, in interaction with their evaluations of the functioning of their society.
Although political trust has been researched widely, neither the theoretical foundation of trust nor its measurement is contested. Hence, this paper draws on a conceptual approach which has been designed by Braithwaite (1998) but received only little attention within the empirical trust research so far. Political trust will be defined as a multidimensional concept holding both, community-based and exchange-based features. While the exchange trust dimension is based on knowledge and performance of the trustee, the community trust dimension is rather based on shared norms and values.
Accordingly, the aim of the paper is to present a model to measure this multidimensional concept of trust and to add, thereby, to the improvement of the methodological understanding of political trust. Since the two trust dimensions are not surveyed within established cross-sectional surveys, they will be measured through the cultural and institutional sources of political trust. First analyses show that political trust can be explained essentially by the two mentioned approaches. However, cultural approaches which refer mainly to socialisation or social capital theories are much more difficult to trace empirically. Therefore, in addition to these conventional approaches, the paper accounts for a new set of indicators - the quality of a society - to explain communal trust finally in an appropriate way. This conceptual approach will be tested empirically with data from the ESS 3 providing a rotating module on social well-being. Since individual-level and contextual-level indicators are taken into account, the models will be estimated by multilevel analysis.