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.

Conflicting theories and mixed empirical results exist on the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust. This article argues that these mixed empirical results might be driven by contextual conditions. We conjecture that political competition could strengthen ethnic saliency and, in turn, salient ethnic identities can activate or intensify in-group trust and depress trust in members of other ethnic groups. We test this conjecture using the move toward secession in Catalonia, Spain. We conduct trust experiments across ethnic lines in Catalonia before and during the secessionist process. After three years of proindependence mobilization in Catalonia, one of the ethnic groups, Spanish speakers living in Catalonia, has indeed increased its in-group trust. This result is robust after a set of individual-level variables are controlled for, but no equivalent result is found in a comparable region, the Basque Country.

Abstract.  In this article, the author analyses the impact of parties' mobilisation strategies at the district level on their vote share in the Spanish 1996 general elections. In order to do this, the author has estimated a multilevel model to test the impact of aggregate mobilisation variables at the district level controlling for voters' individual characteristics. The efforts made by the two main Spanish parties increased their share of the vote. Moreover, their strategies seem to be more efficient for some profiles of voters than for others. The mobilisation of the PSOE especially affected those who had clear political preferences, whereas the PP's mobilisation had stronger effects on less politically aware voters.

This article analyzes the determinants of terrorism saliency in public opinion. It is usually assumed that after a terrorist attack, terrorism becomes automatically salient. However, this assumption is only true in those countries where terrorist attacks are exceptional events. In democracies that have suffered domestic terrorism for decades, the evolution of terrorism saliency does not only depend on the frequency or intensity of terrorist attacks. In this article it is claimed that the tactics carried out by terrorist groups (the type of victim, especially) and the dynamics of political competition (especially the ideology of the incumbent) are also factors that explain the evolution of terrorism saliency. The article also analyzes how these two factors interact with citizens' predispositions to explain variation in their reactions to terrorist threat. The empirical test relies on a novel database from monthly public opinion surveys in Spain from 1993 to 2012.