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A Reconsideration of Olivera’s “Changes in Inequality and Generalized Trust in Europe”

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Abstract

Olivera, in “Changes in Inequality and Generalized Trust in Europe” argues that the relationship between economic inequality and generalized trust becomes insignificant in his time series analyses when regression fixed effects are added to a basic model . I argue that the rationale for his analyses is problematic since neither trust nor inequality change much over time, that he includes former Communist nations inappropriately, and that a full model of trust and inequality must include countries outside Europe.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland–College Park, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Eric M. Uslaner

  2. Center for American Law and Political Science, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China

    Eric M. Uslaner

  3. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Eric M. Uslaner

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  1. Eric M. Uslaner
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Correspondence to Eric M. Uslaner.

Appendix

Appendix

As many others do–he cites Hooghe and Reeskens (2008)–Olivera’s measure of trust includes not only the generalized trust question (“Generally speaking, do you believe that most people can be trusted or can’t you be too careful in dealing with people?”) but also measures of fairness and helpfulness.. Olivera, as many others do, call this composite index “trust.” Yet, trust, helpfulness, and fairness are not the same thing. In the American General Social Survey from 1972 to 2010, the three measures do not scale well. A factor analysis gives a seeming one-dimensional solution, indicating that the three indicators do cluster together. However, the eigenvalue is only .67 and the three measures have a scalability coefficient (alpha) of only .49.

Moreover, the three indicators don’t track each other well over time. In the time series from 1960 to 2012 (employing both the ANES and the General Social Survey in the United States), the aggregate measures of trust and fairness are strongly (r = 79) and helpfulness is correlated with fairness (r = .66). However, helpfulness is only modestly related to trust (r = .269) and barely declines over time (r = .334), while trust has fallen strongly over time (r = –.877).

While the three measures are all correlated in the ESS, the relationships are not universally strong. For half of the 32 countries, the correlations between helpfulness and both trust and fairness are below .5. For 11 countries, the trust-helpfulness correlations are below .4. It is thus a leap to consider the three measures as part of the same syndrome of trust.

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Uslaner, E.M. A Reconsideration of Olivera’s “Changes in Inequality and Generalized Trust in Europe”. Soc Indic Res 128, 723–729 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1053-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1053-z

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