Social and Political Trust: A Longitudinal and Comparative Perspective

1. Social and Political Trust:A Longitudinal and Comparative Perspective Patrick Sturgis, Nick Allum and Roger Patulny Department of Sociology University of Surrey

2. Project Details • ‘Large grant’ project • Two years from 1 March 06 • Causes and consequences of interpersonal trust and trust in government • Main data sources: BHPS, ESS, BSA, NCDS

3. Trust is “the belief that others will not, at worst, knowingly or willingly do you harm, and will, at best, act in your interests” (Delhey and Newton, 2005) “Trust lubricates social life” (Putnam, 1993)

4. 1. Local Areas and Generalised Trust • Most empirical research on generalised trust focuses on either: • Societal • Individual • An important missing level here is the ‘local area’ • Multi-level structural equation models using ESS data (UK only) • Variance components model suggests around 10% of total variance due to local areas

5. 2. A comparative perspective • Extend models from stage 1 to look at country as a new level • 3 level model, with ‘nuts’ as the intermediate level • Test a range of hypotheses regarding societal influences on trust • Particular interest in cross-level interactions

6. 3. Reciprocal Causality? • Interpersonal trust posited to emerge from formal and informal social networks • But in which direction(s) do the causal arrows point? • Cross-lagged Structural Equation Model of social trust and associational membership • BHPS 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005?

7. 4. Cohort Analysis • Examine long-term trends in social trust, trust in government and associational membership • Examine evidence of an interaction with gender • Data from BSA, BES and anywhere else we can find