Does Democracy Foster Trust?

By Helmut Rainer, Thomas Siedler. Social Science Research Network, 2009

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals’ attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), we obtain several interesting results. We first show that, shortly after reunification, East Germans displayed a significantly less trusting attitude than West Germans. We then show that the experience of democracy by East Germans since reunification did not serve to increase levels of social trust significantly. In fact, we cannot reject the hypothesis that East Germans, after more than a decade of democracy, have the same levels of social distrust as shortly after the collapse of communism. In trying to understand the underlying forces, we show that the persistence of social distrust in the East can be explained by negative economic outcomes that many East Germans experienced in the post-reunification period. Interestingly, and in sharp contrast to social trust, we also find that the levels of institutional trust in the East significantly converge towards those in the West. Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2) (2009) 251-269.

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurial role models, fear of failure, and institutional approval of entrepreneurship: a tale of two regions (2016, background): “However, there is ample evidence suggesting that the socialist legacy left an imprint on informal institutions as reflected by persisting differences with respect to norms and values like trust and solidarity (e.g., Brosig-Koch et al., 2011; Rainer and Siedler, 2009; van Hoorn and Maseland, 2010).”
Political regimes and the family: how sex-role attitudes continue to differ in reunified Germany (2011, background): “Given that East and West Germans have been living in one country since 1990, the persistent and even increasing gap in beliefs about appropriate gender roles seems puzzling—even more so given that other studies have found at least some convergence in terms of preferences for redistribution (Alesina ”