Does Social Trust Travel? Comparing Resident and Non‐resident Citizens from a High‐Trusting Country

Abstract

In this study, we analyzed the effects of emigration on a high‐trust population's trust in other people. Our object of study was the Swedish‐speaking Finns, a homogenous national language minority of Finland with a relatively high proportion of emigrants. Using two highly comparable random sample surveys, one among Finland‐Swedes who had emigrated and one among Finland‐Swedes residing in Finland, we used emigration as a quasi‐experiment for explaining change in social trust. Theoretically, our aim was to test the symmetry of the experiential theory that, in similar studies but with low‐trust populations emigrating to higher trusting countries, has been found to explain an increase in trust. We distinguished between highly similar destinations and destinations that have lower levels of social trust. With the entropy balancing technique of weighting the covariates of the control group, we constructed two conditionally identical groups. The average difference in outcome of the weighted groups shows that the emigrants lost some of their trust when moving to countries with lower levels of trust. The effect was, however, time indifferent, which casts doubt on the assimilation hypothesis. The findings indicate that the experiential theory can explain also the loss of trust but that this comes with some restrictions.