Abstract
The theory of social capital rarely takes economic variables into account. This article confirms that economic factors had greater explanatory power for social trust and trust in institutions during times of economic crisis, due mainly to increased economic polarization of the population. We use Spain as a case study to analyse the impact of a number of variables on social and institutional trust before and during the economic crisis. The 2008 economic crisis in Spain resulted in a paradox: a notable decline in trust in institutions, together with a surprising increase—rather than the expected decrease—in social trust. The data analysed here also highlight the possibility that the two types of trust did not track in a mutually supportive manner due to the emergence of Movimiento 15 M, which gave rise to the appearance of new political parties such as Podemos, on the extreme left of the electoral scale.
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Notes
Unemployment severely affected the construction and service sectors that are central to an economy with a large tourism industry. However, following Foronda-Robles et al. (2016), tourism industry has shown itself to be more able to recover from the economic crisis than other economic sectors.
Following Parés, Ospina and Subirats in their book “Social Innovation and Democratic Leadership” published in 2017 at Edward Elgar, 15 M movement in Spain is a significant example of the urban protests that has multiplied at a global level such as Occupy Wall Street in the US and “the Arab Spring”. These protests have been conceptualized as “Revolution 2.0”. These mobilizations were linked to a proliferating series of eruptions of discontent in cities as diverse as Madrid, Barcelona, Athens, Lisbon, Rome, El Cairo, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, México, Honk Kong, Paris and New York. In the countries of Southern Europe the crisis was especially virulent, so these social movements remained firm, giving rise to political parties of the extreme left such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, or the 5 Star Movement in Italy.
\(^{\prime}\) Indicates the transpose of the vector.
When the variables are standard normal variable, the matrix of variances and covariances are equivalent to the matrix of linear correlations.
The estimated correlation matrix, \(\widehat{{{\text{R}},{ }}}\) provides information on the dependency between levels of trust not captured by the explanatory variables. If these correlations were zero, the optimal result would be to estimate five univariate Probit models. However, the estimated correlations are significantly different to zero.
The AIC is equal to (2*number of parameters-2*logarithm of likelihood). It allows to compare nested models with different number of parameters. In our case multivariate model with dependence adds the correlation parameters.
However, levels of trust in institutions did not differ significantly between individuals who participated in civic associations and those who did not, neither before nor during the crisis. We only observe greater levels of trust in political parties among people who worked in tertiary sector associations in the year 2013, although this data is only marginally significant and is surely explained by the links between some of these associations and the political parties themselves.
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Caïs, J., Torrente, D. & Bolancé, C. The Effects of Economic Crisis on Trust: Paradoxes for Social Capital Theory. Soc Indic Res 153, 173–192 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02385-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02385-w