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Trust and trustworthiness after a land restitution program: lab-in-the-field evidence from Colombia

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Abstract

We assess the impact on trust and trustworthiness of a governmental program to compensate victims of forced displacement. All our subjects were eligible to apply for restitution of their land in accordance with the 2011 “Bill of Victims” issued by the Colombian government. The key independent variable of our analysis is whether a subject had obtained land within this or similar programs. Our dependent variables are a subject's trust and trustworthiness to unknown others, as measured by an experimental Trust Game. We focus on interpersonal trust and trustworthiness because of their well-documented positive effect on economic development. Our design also included a treatment in which subjects voted on their most preferred outcomes in the game, as it has been shown that consultative democracy can increase mutual trust in other settings. We find that land restitution is significantly correlated with higher trustworthiness, while there is no correlation with trust. This is consistent with the idea that trust and trustworthiness tap into different aspects of individual motivations. Voting is not correlated with trust but is associated with higher trustworthiness in one of the measures, although there is no differential impact for those who were granted land. We compare the effect of having been granted land with rural and urban samples who were not victims of displacement. Overall, our results suggest that land restitution empowers victims reestablishing social capital. The evidence on the impact of political participation and its interaction with land restitution is inconclusive.

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Notes

  1. A couple of clarifications are in order. First, since 2011, a new Register has been created (Unique Register of Victims; RUV per the acronym in Spanish); according to the most recent available data, more than eight million victims have been officially recognized as affected by the internal conflict. Second, the amount of dispossessed land is unclear, essentially because the legal status of most rural properties is not formalized. Ibáñez et al. (2006), in an initial estimate, placed this number at 1.2 million hectares, but there are estimates as high as 10 million (Sánchez León, 2017). The 5.5 million estimate is validated by the largest survey of victims (Contraloría, 2014), and it is the figure on which the legislative agenda has been based.

  2. Note that the “Share equally” option prescribes the receiver to return 2 tokens when AS equals one, and four tokens when AS equals two.

  3. The text of instructions to the sender was: “Please, indicate how many tokens you would consider opportune for the sender to send to the receiver”. The text for the receiver was: “For each situation, indicate whether you believe that it was opportune or not that the receiver transferred a part of her tokens.” The options for the receiver further specified: “The receiver does not have to transfer anything” and “The receiver has to transfer a share of his or her tokens”. The final allocation of tokens in each situation was then specified. The adjective used in the original Spanish was “oportuno”, a word that conveys a sense of obligation, albeit without a strong moral connotation, as in its English equivalent. See the SOM: Section S2.1 for the full version of the instructions.

  4. The text of the relative instructions was as follows: “According to sessions previously performed in some Colombian villages, the majority of the participants considered opportune for the sender to send two tokens to the receiver. According to the same sessions, the majority considered opportune for the receiver to share when the sender sent one token. According to the same sessions, the majority considered opportune for the receiver to share when the sender sent two tokens.” See the SOM: Section S2 for the full version of the instructions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Investigaciones Para el Desarrollo, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Carrera 30, No 45-03, Bloque 311, Oficina 12b, 3165000, Bogotá, Colombia

    Francesco Bogliacino

  2. Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

    Francesco Bogliacino

  3. Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel, Germany

    Gianluca Grimalda

  4. Rosario Experimental and Behavioral Economics Lab - REBEL Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia

    Laura Jiménez

  5. Independent Researcher, Bogotá, Colombia

    Daniel Reyes Galvis

  6. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Cristiano Codagnone

  7. Università Degli Studi Di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Cristiano Codagnone

Authors
  1. Francesco Bogliacino
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  2. Gianluca Grimalda
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  5. Cristiano Codagnone
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Correspondence to Francesco Bogliacino.

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Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

We thank Open Evidence for financing the fieldwork. Laura Jiménez thanks Fondazione Franceschi for the research grant. Daniel Reyes thanks Open Evidence for the research grant. Francesco Bogliacino thanks Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz for time availability for the meetings with community leaders. We thank all the personal in Cedecampo and Gabriel Urbano in particular. We thank all the community leaders for their assistance in recruiting participants. We also thank all participants at the 14th Meeting of the HiCN in Medellin, at the Semana de la Economía at the Tadeo University, in the Simposio de Microeconomía in Bogotá, in seminars at the Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia), SSSUP (Pisa, Italy), the doctoral seminar at the Universidad Nacional (Bogotá, Colombia), the Experimental Economics group at the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), the Behavioral and Experimental Economics Course at the Universidad Nacional (Bogotá, Colombia), and the Workshop “Explaining Economic Change” in Rome (Italy). We appreciate comments from the editor and two anonymous referees. The usual disclaimer applies.

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Bogliacino, F., Grimalda, G., Jiménez, L. et al. Trust and trustworthiness after a land restitution program: lab-in-the-field evidence from Colombia. Const Polit Econ 33, 135–161 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-021-09339-5

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