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Yet Another Case of Nordic Exceptionalism? Extending Existing Evidence for a Causal Relationship Between Institutional and Social Trust to the Netherlands and Switzerland

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Abstract

Social trust has typically been considered a deep-seated, thus stable, disposition. However, in accordance with institutional theory, a recent analysis applying fixed effects regressions provides strong evidence for a causal influence of trust in state institutions on social trust in Denmark, indicating that trust in other people might be malleable through the quality of state institutions. However, it is still unclear whether this finding can be generalised beyond the setting of Danish or Nordic exceptionalism—a social environment highly conducive to trust. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this study is to test the institutional theory in two other European countries: the Netherlands and Switzerland. Drawing on the LISS panel and the Swiss Household Panel, each with different strengths and weaknesses, the results provide further support for the idea that trust in the majority of other people is shaped by the trustworthiness of state institutions in Western societies.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that there is also a growing literature arguing that social trust is influenced by experiences with ethnic diversity (see, e.g., Dinesen and Sønderskov 2015) or by unemployment experience (Laurence 2015).

  2. Moreover, we exclude 7 and 299 observations from the SHP and LISS panel, respectively, due to some data inconsistencies over time, such as varying birth cohorts and a lower educational degree than in the previous waves.

  3. The wording of the question is slightly different in the SHP: “Would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people […]?”.

  4. We exclude observations with only one valid response from the analysis.

  5. Depending both on the survey wave and the specific pattern of survey participation of the respondent, institutional trust is measured in December (of the previous year), January, February or March, whereas social trust is measured in May, June or August of the same year.

  6. We use the imputed income information in both surveys. For a description of the imputation procedure in the LISS panel survey until August 2011, see http://www.lissdata.nl/dataarchive/hosted_files/download/2629 and, for the new procedure since September 2011, see http://www.lissdata.nl/dataarchive/hosted_files/download/1579. For the procedure in the SHP, see http://forscenter.ch/en/our-surveys/swiss-household-panel/documentationfaq-2/methods/. Moreover, the net equivalent income is based on the monthly income in the LISS panel and the yearly income in the SHP. In the LISS panel, all covariates are collected in the same month as institutional trust. Income information is first available in July 2008, which is used to obtain an estimate of the income in December 2007 and March 2008.

  7. Additional robustness checks reveal that the influence of Dutch state institutions is neither largely different when controlling for the time lag, nor does the size of the influence vary significantly by process time. Furthermore, the effect does not change markedly when using the initial categories of employment status and education in both surveys.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Peter Thisted Dinesen, Ingmar Rapp, Kathia Serrano-Velarde, Jan Eckhard and the participants of the research colloquium of Professor Thomas Klein at Heidelberg University for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. He also thanks three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This study has been realised using the data collected by the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), which is based at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences FORS. The project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The LISS panel data were collected by CentERdata (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) through its MESS project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. The author is grateful for financial support by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

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  1. Max-Weber-Institute of Sociology, Heidelberg University, Bergheimer Str. 58, 69115, Heidelberg, Germany

    Nico Seifert

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Appendix

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Table 4 Confirmatory factor analysis of institutional trust
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Table 5 Measurements
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Seifert, N. Yet Another Case of Nordic Exceptionalism? Extending Existing Evidence for a Causal Relationship Between Institutional and Social Trust to the Netherlands and Switzerland. Soc Indic Res 136, 539–555 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1564-x

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