Analyses of social capital and immigration have stressed the negative impact that culturally diverse societies have for the development of social trust. Ethnic heterogeneity, according to these studies, is associated with lower levels of social trust. However, social trust has not been studied as an independent variable in order to explain attitudes towards immigration. This article argues that societies with high levels of social capital facilitate the integration of immigrants because those members with high levels of social trust will tend to have more positive attitudes towards immigration. This hypothesis is empirically tested in a cross‐country multi‐level empirical analysis for sixteen European countries, drawing on the 2002–3 European Social Survey. This analysis shows that, regardless of the impact of other individual‐level variables and contextual variables such as levels of unemployment or percentage of foreign population, those with high social capital do exhibit more positive attitudes towards immigration than the rest of the population.
The role of the state in the promotion of social or generalized trust is one of the most important ongoing topics in social capital research. We suggest that the state can play a positive role in the creation of social trust as a third-party enforcer of private agreements. This positive effect depends on the efficacy of the state. We also argue that the effects of the state on social trust will be unevenly distributed among majoritarian and minoritarian ethnic groups. These hypotheses are tested using the European Social Survey (2002—03) and confirmed for a dataset of 22 European countries.
Exploring the dynamic relationships among political institutions, attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes, this series is problem-driven and pluralistic in methodology. It examines the evolution of governance, public policy, and political economy in different national and historical contexts.It will explore social dilemmas, such as collective-action problems, and enhance understanding of how political outcomes result from the interaction among political ideas-including values, beliefs, or social norms-institutions, and interests. It will promote cutting-edge work in historical institutionalism, rational choice, and game theory, and the processes of institutional change and/or evolutionary models of political history.
There is a growing interest in the literature on trust and social capital in the analysis of the role of the State in the creation and destruction of trust. According to some authors, the intervention of the State crowds out trust instead of fostering it. In this article, the author shows that the intervention of the State as a third-party enforcer of agreements does not crowd out expectations of trust, but it does not create trust either. However, it is further shown that the absence or inefficacy of the State does destroy trust. This last idea is illustrated with a classical case in the social capital literature: Southern Italy in the modern period.
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