Levels Of Social Trust Research Articles

Trust and Social Inequality: The Case of Russia

The article focuses on the study of relationship between trust and social inequality in Russian society. The methodological framework is an integrated multidisciplinary approach which combines sociological and economic theories. The research is based on official statistics and social surveys of international, national, and regional levels. The analysis shows that in Russia there is still excessive inequality (since 2003, the fund ratio has not dropped below 15 times, and the Ginny index is below 0.4). Using the method of two-dimensional distributions, we assessed the impact of social inequality on the level of generalized trust in Russia as a whole and the Vologda Oblast in particular. It was revealed that the Russian society is characterized by a low level of social trust and its increasing trends cannot be predicted. The existing mistrust is compounded by the stratification of society, persistence of significant differences in the level of well-being of the population, and the lack of mutual understanding between the poor and the rich. The article confirms the fact that the level of generalized trust depends on the economic component: with a decrease in well-being of the population, the level of mistrust grows. We conclude that the variables of inequality and trust form a vicious circle with poles of inversely proportional impact on each other. The practical task is to find a solution to the current situation. As a further research prospect, the article indicates the development of science-based proposals in solving the problem of the relationship between social inequality and public trust.

Restoring patient trust in healthcare: medical information impact case study in Poland

BackgroundThis study empirically evaluates the influence of medical information on patient trust at the physician level, the medical profession, hospitals, and with the payer. Restoring patient trust in a medical setting in Poland appears to be significantly affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Patient trust improves results from medical treatment, raises perception of healthcare performance, and smoothens the overall functionality of healthcare systems.MethodsIn order to study trust volatility, patients took part in a three-stage experiment designed via: (1) measured level of trust, (2) randomly dividing participants into two groups—control (i.e., re-examination of level of trust) and experimental (i.e., being exposed to a piece of certain manipulative information), and (3) checking whether observational changes were permanent.ResultsResults indicate that in the experimental group the increase of trust was noticed in the payer (27.7%, p < 0.001), hospitals (10.9%, p = 0.011), and physicians (decrease of 9.2%, p = 0.036).ConclusionThe study indicated that in Poland medical information is likely to influence patient trust in healthcare while interpersonal and social trust levels may be related to increases of trust in hospitals and in the payer versus decreases in physicians.

SOCIAL TRUST AS A FACTOR OF PERCEPTION OF CORRUPTION(AS RESULTS OF A SOCIOLOGICAL SURVEY IN THE ALTAI KRAI)

The article presents the data of a sociological study conducted among the population of the Altai Territory (n = 1200). The purpose of this work is to determine the relationship between the population's perception of corruption and the level of social trust. Within the framework of this article, the characteristics of the level of generalized, interpersonal, particular and institutional trust were given. Perceptions of corruption were examined at the social, group and individual levels. An analysis was also made of the degree to which the population feels that they are protected from corruption. The analysis revealed statistically significant differences in the perception of corruption depending on the socio-demographic characteristics of the population (gender, income, education, social status). As a result of the classification carried out using the decision tree method, it was revealed what role generalized, interpersonal, particular and institutional trust plays in conjunction with the socio-demographic characteristics of the population and the feeling of their protection from corruption in the structure of positive / negative perception of corruption by the population in the public, group and individual level.

The Power of Informal Institutions: Social Trust and Corporate Environmental Responsibility

Informal institutions can significantly shape the behaviors of various economic organizations within a society by creating unique business infrastructure and value orientation. While the existing literature pays more attention to the financial consequences, little known about their environmental impacts. By linking institutional theory with environmentalism literature, this study develops a theoretical framework and empirically tests how social trust, one dimension of informal institutions, influences corporate environmental responsibility. Using a longitudinal dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2006 to 2015, we find support that firms located in regions with higher level of social trust engage in more environmental responsibility activities. Furthermore, we show that this result is more pronounced when local environmental protests are fewer and information transparency is less. Our findings highlight the importance of social trust for environmental behaviors, provide evidence of two unexplored substitution mechanisms, and show how firms from emerging economies respond to environmental concerns.

The economics of change and stability in social trust: Evidence from (and for) Catalan secession

AbstractConsequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spain: First, we test whether Catalonia enjoys higher levels of social capital that it is prevented from capitalizing on. Second, the paper examines whether secessionist movements create animosity and political divisions within society that undermine trust. Employing the nine available waves of the European Social Survey for Spain, we only find weak indications that social trust levels are higher in Catalonia than in the rest of the country. Interestingly, we further find testimony of a purely transient “exuberance effect” after secession became a real option, indicating that the long‐run evolution of social trust may best be thought of as a stable punctuated equilibrium.

Investigating when religious culture increases trade credit: A signaling theory approach

AbstractDrawing on signaling theory, we propose that religious culture leads suppliers to alter their beliefs about their customers’ trustworthiness. Strong religious cultures are interpreted as a signal of fewer agency problems and less information asymmetry, which helps firms gain more trade credit from suppliers. The empirical tests performed in this study show that firms headquartered in areas with strong religious cultures receive more trade credit than other firms. This positive relation is more prominent when such firms are located in areas with lower levels of social trust. A further analysis reveals that the increasing effect of religious culture on trade credit eases financing constraints. Overall, our findings indicate that religious culture can be a broad indicator of firms’ ethical preferences that influences their access to trade credit by signaling their potential for a high level of trustworthiness.

Who Cares about Crackdowns? Exploring the Role of Trust in Individual Philanthropy

AbstractThe phenomenon of closing civic space has adversely impacted international non‐governmental organization (INGO) funding. We argue that individual private donors can be important in sustaining the operations of INGOs working in repressive contexts. Individual donors do not use the same performance‐based metrics as official aid donors. Rather, trust can be an important component of individual donor support for nonprofits working towards difficult goals. How does trust in charitable organizations influence individuals' preferences to donate, especially when these groups face crackdown? Using a simulated market for philanthropic donations based on data from a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States who regularly donate to charity, we find that trust in INGOs matters substantially in shaping donor preferences. Donor profiles with high levels of social trust are likely to donate to INGOs with friendly relationships with host governments. This support holds steady if INGOs face criticism or crackdown. In contrast, donor profiles with lower levels of social trust prefer to donate to organizations that do not face criticism or crackdown abroad. The global crackdown on NGOs may thus possibly sour NGOs' least trusting individual donors. Our findings have practical implications for INGOs raising funds from individuals amid closing civic space.

Restricting NGOs: From Pushback to Accommodation

Restricting NGOs: From Pushback to Accommodation

How to combine descriptiveand normative approaches in participatory urban planning: an experimental mixed-method implemented in the downtown district of Poznań, Poland

AbstractThis article presents a tool for reaching consensus in the participatory planning of the conversion and renovation of an urban space. It is based on the main assumption of combining descriptive and normative approaches in the actions of experts. It is an innovative way to strengthen the possibility of expert assessment in the decision-making process concerning desired spatial transformations. The authors hereof resorted to their own long-term experience when elaborating a tool that can easily support the selection of the optimal solution for maximizing benefits and minimizing outlay. The issues presented herein refer to the Central European context, which is characterized by a low level of social trust and by contentiousness in making joint decisions. The tool presented herein can contribute to participatory planning practice by enabling an expert to select solutions that meet the highest efficiency criteria on more objective grounds. It can be used to identify the convergent expectations of various social groups, thus facilitating conflict mitigation and arrival at a consensus. As a result, it can underlie the process of building social trust.

Scale of cities and social trust: Evidence from China

How do the economic characteristics of regions affect social trust? This article tries to answer this question using a dynamic game model with empirical testing. People in regions with a larger scale of economic activity are usually made up of groups with different historical or cultural backgrounds. The dynamic game with incomplete information will lead to misperceptions among groups and will reduce the mutual trust level. The results of OLS regression reveal that city's economic scale and residents' average social trust are negatively correlated based on the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) with a sample size of 40,360 and Map Apps data. This study overcomes the endogeneity problem by using the distance from a city to Beijing and Shanghai as the instrumental variable. Results from the 2SLS analysis confirm that the prior negative correlation remains. A 1% increase in economic scale drops the trust level by 0.05%. In addition, women in large cities have lower trust levels than their male counterparts. Policymakers should aim to reduce the probability of misunderstanding among the groups to increase the level of social trust.

The Multidimensionality of Trust: Assessing Finnish Audiences’ Views on the Trustworthiness of Digital News

Finland provides an interesting case study on trust in the media in the digital era. The country is known to exhibit the greatest levels of trust in the political establishment and the government, as well as the media. In the Finnish “digital welfare state,” the news is an inseparable part of the mechanism, producing a high level of social trust within the welfare state system, and Finland features the highest level of media freedom and literacy in Europe. This multimethod study examines different understandings of trust by studying in what ways Finnish audiences experience trust in news, especially when consuming news on digital platforms, and what factors explain trust in different news sources. Our basic premise is that trust can be understood in three ways: as dispositions of individual actors, as the social organization and the relationship between different social nodes and the system, and as a constantly negotiated property of social relations. We apply this three-dimensional framework in two sets of audience survey research data (2019, 2020) and reflect the findings with a focus group and expert interviews as well as with two similar surveys a decade prior. Our results depict relatively high levels of trust in the media in Finland and surprisingly little change in audiences’ perceptions of trustworthiness compared to the earlier surveys. The most defining characteristic of Finnish audiences is critical trust. Audiences are aware of the impacts of digitization, especially the dangers of social media bubbles and disinformation. They also recognize market-driven imperatives of journalism yet appreciate legacy news media in its different digital forms. Our study indicates that a balance between skepticism and reliance on news outlets can exist in audiences’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of digital news.

Sustainability in City-Regionalism as Emergent Practice: The Case of the BRICS

Sustainability concerns transgress jurisdictional boundaries compelling multi-scalar and inter-jurisdictional responses. The city-region is one of the scales at which governance actors may mobilise for sustainability and this is now recognised in literatures on integrated food systems, for example. However, within the mainstream debates on city-regions, sustainability as a motivation for inter-jurisdictional governance is still given scant attention. This paper considers the extent to which sustainability is present as a driver towards city-region governance, using countries within the still underexplored BRICS cluster as cases studies. The paper shows that in practice the connection between environmental sustainability and city regionalism remains mainly limited and fractious. In all cases, however, there are emergent connections which offer the potential for stronger connections. Most importantly, public reaction to a mounting environmental crisis in the BRICS is obliging the actors of governance, concerned with sustaining their public legitimacy, to establish or strengthen inter-jurisdictional and collaborative relationships across city-regions. There are however significant limits to these endeavours, especially where levels of social trust are low, or where sustainability problems are rooted within unsustainable national growth paths.

Social Trust and Anti-immigrant Attitudes in Europe: A Longitudinal Multi-Level Analysis.

Research investigating how social conditions influence attitudes about immigrants has focused primarily on demographic and economic factors as potential threat inducing contexts that lead to anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the empirical evidence supporting this link is mixed, while social cohesion indicators such as the influence of social trust, have largely been left unexamined. This article uses the European Social Survey (2002–2016) to test how differences in social trust, both within and between countries influence attitudes about immigrants. Results from longitudinal analyses show that countries with higher levels of social trust have more favorable attitudes toward immigrants, and while changes in social trust over time are small, they result in comparably large changes in anti-immigrant attitudes, even when controlling for other social factors. These results are robust across different model specifications and data sources.

Are regions equal in adversity? A spatial analysis of spread and dynamics of COVID-19 in Europe.

Often presented as a global pandemic spreading all over the world, COVID-19, however, hit not only countries but also regions differently. The objective of this paper is to focus on the spatial heterogeneity in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and to contribute to an understanding of the channels by which it spread, focusing on the regional socioeconomic dimension. For this, we use a dataset covering 125 European regions in 12 countries. Considering that the impact of the COVID-19 crisis differed sharply not only across countries but also across regions within the same country, the empirical strategy is based, on the one hand, on an exploratory analysis of spatial autocorrelations, which makes it possible to identify regional clusters of the disease. On the other hand, we use spatial regression models to capture the diffusion effect and the role of different families of regional factors in this process. We find that the share of older people in the population, GDP per capita, distance from achieving EU objectives, and the unemployment rate are correlated with high COVID-19 death rates. In contrast, the number of medical practitioners and hospital beds and the level of social trust are correlated with low COVID-19 death rates.

On the brink: identifying psychological indicators of societal destabilization in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea

ABSTRACT Contemporary hostile actors are increasingly attempting to destabilize targeted states’ civilian domains via malign influence activities. With this civilian focus, societal destabilization is at least partly psychological. However, empirical evidence of a psychological dimension to societal destabilization is lacking. We assess the potential of five pertinent psychological factors to indicate societal destabilization using data captured about citizens living in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, prior to the outbreak of conflict in 2014. Analysts state that Russian influence activities contributed to societal destabilization in these regions. Using preregistered analyses, we contrast the self-reported levels of our selected psychological factors in these citizens against the self-reported levels of citizens from contextually and culturally similar societies. We confirmed that levels of political and social trust were significantly lower, and the perception of economic instability was significantly higher in citizens of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea. Although observational, the results point to the relevance of these psychological factors for understanding societal destabilization provoked by influence activities.

Young local civil servants’ trust in citizens: empirical evidence from the post-reform-and-opening-up generations in China

ABSTRACT Civil servants’ trust in citizens is an important but insufficiently addressed issue in public administration. It is the key component of democratic governance and cooperation shaping. This study examines patterns of young civil servants’ trust in citizens, and explores the factors accounting for the variance of young civil servants’ trust within the Chinese context. Our primary finding is that the attitude held among China’s young civil servants is neither too strong in trust in citizens nor in distrust of them. By employing ordinal logistic regression analysis, this study demonstrates that four factors significantly affect young civil servants’ trust in citizens: their social trust level, their perception of citizens’ ability to participate (knowledge-based trust), their spirit of self-sacrifice, and their authority-respecting political orientation. We propose that the cultivation of an attitude of trust in citizens by young civil servants is crucial for lubricating the process of China’s administrative reforms.

The role of trust and social commitment in start-up financing

Access to finance is a perennial problem for business start-ups. This article advances the extant literature on the determinants of entrepreneurial finance by presenting a comprehensive analysis of the amount needed to start a business, the amount of self-investment and the number of external sources of financing utilized. Based on information from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2015, the empirical analysis shows that the availability of external sources of financing depend primarily on demographics, entrepreneurial experience, business features, e.g., export propensity and growth potential; and, on the phase of economic development. Furthermore, relatively high levels of social trust may increase the likelihood of obtaining external financing. The novelty of the product/service offered, financial barriers and investor/property rights protection in turn may also explain the proportion of self-investment provided to a new business. An analysis of financing options of socially-oriented businesses shows that they are more successful in obtaining financial support from private investors/venture capitalists and governments.

Does social trust always explain the active use of sharing-based programs?: A cross-national comparison of Indian and U.S. rideshare consumers

The global trend of the sharing economy has led consumers to use peer-to-peer systems. However, little is known about the cultural difference in forming trust in the platform entities that is critical for participating in sharing programs. The current study researches how social trust perception affects trust in technology and platform-based trust: trust in providers, other users, and the platform company and whether it varies across cultures. Focusing on Indian and U. S. consumers, we propose that cultural orientation (cultural tightness) impacts trust formation and continuation intention. Specifically, in India, trust in technology is formed regardless of the individual's perceived social trust level, which positively impacts the trust in the platform players. For American consumers, their trust in technology is based on social trust perception, which subsequently leads to the sharing participation. This is the pioneering work to investigate social trust-the use of sharing program relation based on cultural tightness.

Trust, accountability and ‘the Other’ within the charitable context: U.K. service clubs and grant‐making activity

AbstractThe third sector encompasses many types of not‐for‐profit organisations (NPOs). This results in a diverse sector, where accountabilities vary and are complex. In this paper, we explore notions of accountability at the micro level of social analysis, between individuals, and enacted through social interaction. We aim to provide detail on how accountability is enacted at this level of analysis, and the role(s) of trust (if any) in this form of accountability. We employ a theoretical framework incorporating the theoretical constructs of accountability, trust and ‘the Other’, with additional support derived from literature that specifically discusses the relationship(s) between accountability, the Other and wider ethics. We employ a qualitative methodological framework, with two sources of data. The primary source of data included 42 semi‐structured interviews conducted with service club members, along with representatives of donor organisations, beneficiary organisations and local government. In addition, documentary evidence was utilised in support of the primary data gathered. Following the application of qualitative data analysis techniques, we conclude that, at the micro level of social analysis, trust and accountability are intertwined concepts. We observed that the main mechanism for the discharge of accountability was via the formation and maintenance of personal relationships between members of the service club and key external stakeholders. We also conclude that charity offers individuals a means by which to particularise aspects of the Other, through the undertaking of charitable action. Within this particularisation process, facilitated by connecting with other individuals, accountability not only takes a different form than more hierarchical forms of accountability, but also serves to build interconnectedness between individuals, and provide satisfaction of the desire for the Other in volunteers and stakeholders alike.

Dynamic relay access for D2D-aided low-latency and high-reliability communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications allow direct connections among devices to lower transmission latency and network loads of the existing cellular mobile networks. To fully exploit the benefits of D2D communications, relay access is one of the critical challenges upon employing the optimal cooperative relay user equipments (UEs) for data forwarding. The existed relay access approaches usually neglect the inherent motivation that whether the relay is reluctant to forward the information of other UEs based on its status, such as limited battery, service cost and social ties. In this paper, we jointly investigate both the transmission delay and the reliability performance for designing a relay access scheme combined with the impacts of the physical layer and the social layer. Meanwhile, considering the user mobility and status, a dynamic relay access model is constructed with the utility function of the weighted average of latency and social trust level under the long-term constraints. To solve this problem, Lyapunov framework is proposed for converting it into a renewal-reward system towards infinite time horizon, and numerical results show the benefits of the proposed scheme compared with other schemes under dynamic scenarios, as it can lower the latency while guaranteeing the reliability of relay access.