Abstract
Theorists have long disagreed about the impact of socio-economic modernization on social trust. The pessimistic school asserts that modernization undermines the structural conditions for high levels of trust. The optimistic account argues that it delivers economic security and human empowerment and thereby enhances trust. Adapting these contrasting theories to the specific case of China, this article puts them to the test with survey data from the World Values Survey. Exploiting the condition of highly uneven levels of regional development, combined with common political institutions and a shared cultural heritage, the study conducts a multi-level analysis of survey data from over 1900 individuals and a wide range of regional statistics from 61 county-level units. While trust in family members and particular trust beyond the family are unaffected by levels of regional modernization, we find robust evidence to suggest that regional modernization is associated with substantially higher levels of general trust. The results further suggests that higher general trust in more developed regions does not lead to an enhanced conversion of particular into general trust. This indicates that general trust is nurtured through the contextual effect of residing in more modern social environments. Overall, these findings provide substantial support for modernization optimists and lend themselves to a reinterpretation of a widely discussed “trust crisis” in China, which to date is often interpreted according to the pessimistic view of modernization.
Highlights
What is the impact of socio-economic modernization on social trust? Optimists claim that modernization boosts human empowerment through increasing collective resources, which puts people in a better position to trust their fellow citizens (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Welzel 2005)
Evidence suggests that a necessary condition for the derivative extension of trust from people one knows to strangers and out-groups is that individuals have positive experiences with strangers (Freitag and Traunmüller 2009, p. 796; Glanville and Paxton 2007). Such experiences are more likely to take place in urban areas and— echoing Nee, Holm and Opper’s findings (2018)—in prosperous regions. Both dimensions of modernization may facilitate the extension of particular into general trust: H5 The individual-level association between particular trust and general trust is stronger in regions which are characterized by a higher degree of structural modernization and resource modernization
The position of county-level units that are officially designated as rural counties and county-level cities, and urban districts provides initial support for the optimistic modernization narrative
Summary
What is the impact of socio-economic modernization on social trust? Optimists claim that modernization boosts human empowerment through increasing collective resources, which puts people in a better position to trust their fellow citizens (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Due to the uneven nature of this development, huge regional disparities emerged (Ravallion and Chen 2007; Wu and Perloff 2005) This makes China a unique case, exhibiting, on the one hand, extreme regional variation in modernization levels and, on the other, a common cultural heritage and identical political institutions. Previous research typically focused on trust “in most people”, as the most frequently used survey question is phrased This measure of social trust is difficult to interpret in the Chinese context. We discuss the pessimistic and optimistic modernization narratives and their application to the case of China. This is followed by an introduction of our data and methodology, our results, and several robustness checks. We conclude with a summary and a discussion of our main findings
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