Abstract
Education is one of the most commonly proposed determinants of social trust (generalized trust). Nevertheless, the empirical evidence of a causal relationship between education and social trust is inconclusive. This study contributes to this discussion in two ways. First, its design provides strong grounds for causal inference across multiple countries by exploiting numerous European compulsory schooling reforms. Second, it considers how the structure of education, specifically between-school tracking, impacts the relationship between education and social trust. The article argues that less tracking is positive for social trust because it entails intergroup contacts between children with different social backgrounds. The results do not give support for a general positive effect of education on social trust as the effect of reforms that extend compulsory education is positive but small and not statistically significant. However, reforms that reduce tracking have a somewhat larger, but still modest, positive and statistically significant effect on social trust. The effect is more pronounced for individuals with poorly educated parents. The positive effect of detracking reforms goes hand-in-hand with more understanding attitudes towards persons with a different background than one’s own. The lack of a clear effect of reforms that extend compulsory schooling on social trust reinforces the findings of recent single-country studies that have been unable to confirm a causal effect of education on social trust. However, the effect of detracking reforms, albeit modest, shows that education can have a positive effect on social trust but that the institutional character of education may be a conditioning factor.
Highlights
Social trust relates to a plethora of positive outcomes ranging from economic growth to political participation (Bjørnskov 2012; Uslaner and Brown 2005)
The Reform coefficient in this model demonstrates the effect of the reforms among individuals with poorly educated parents, whereas the effect for those with highly educated parents is equivalent to the sum of the reform and the parental education interaction coefficients
This paper finds that compulsory schooling reforms have small to modest positive effects on social trust
Summary
Social trust relates to a plethora of positive outcomes ranging from economic growth to political participation (Bjørnskov 2012; Uslaner and Brown 2005). Almost all of these studies rely on cross-sectional evidence and assume that the established correlations describe a causal relationship This interpretation has come into question as more recent studies using research designs that allow stronger causal claims have been unable to unanimously reproduce a clear relationship between education and social trust (Sønderskov and Dinesen 2014; Glanville et al 2013; Oskarsson 2017; Yang 2019; but see, Huang et al 2011). Between-school tracking is one of the institutions that most strongly distinguishes educational systems (e.g., Pfeffer 2008; Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011) It refers to students being separated into different tracks according to ability or future plans for further education (Shavit and Müller 2000). This positive effect is robust to several alternative empirical specifications and is coupled with other effects that support the intergroup contact mechanism
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