Social and political trust : The origins of and the connection between generalised social trust and trust in political institutions in European democracies

This master thesis seeks to explore the origins of generalised social trust and trust in political institutions in European democracies. Generalised social trust is assumed to have beneficial consequences for both individuals and society, but does it lead to high political trust? Classical theorists suggested that there was a close link between these two types of trust, but this lacks strong and sustained empirical support. I explore the relationship between these two types of trust on individual and on country level. The thesis includes both the old, established democracies in Western Europe, and the new, former communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe The research methods are quantitative – using data from European Social Survey round 3. The most important conclusions from this research is the following; origins of social trust mostly could be found among measures of success – being highly educated and satisfied with own life and economy shows important for explaining levels of trust. Also when it comes to political trust, satisfaction with own life and own economy is important explanation factors. Turning to country level, the findings shows that being a protestant country has a robust positive effect on both social and political trust. The analyses also show that belonging among the Post-Communist countries leads to lower levels of trust in the societies. This effect, however, goes via the index of human development to both types of trust. There are no signs that there is any characteristic in the Post-Communist countries not measured by the Human Development Index that contributes to the lower levels of social and political trust in these countries. HDI has the strongest explanation power of all the achieved variables in the analysis, and the broader lesson of this is that in order to raise the levels of trust in societies, emphasis should be put on basic human development. The most interesting result was that generalised social trust showed to be a strong and significant explanation factor of political trust in the analyses on both levels