Why Do Homogenous Communities Have Higher Levels of Trust?

• In Event: Political Trust

Abstract

The sociopolitical effects of diversity have long been an important topic in the social scientific literature. According to one influential school of research, social homogeneity across and within countries is correlated with improved governance, increased social capital, trust, and cohesion. At the same time, another body of scholarship has shown that social homogeneity can itself be a result of higher levels of state capacity (Wimmer 2016). To the extent that increased state capabilities and effective nation-building institutions can also promote higher levels of social capital and civil society development, as demonstrated in recent research (Jensen and Ramey 2021, Cansunar and Bozcaga 2021), the positive effects of ethnic homogeneity on social capital may not only be spurious, but also limited only to those groups that have access to the state.
In this paper, we investigate this question by focusing on the case of Brazil. We argue that besides shaping the contemporary ethnic composition of local communities, the distribution of state presence across the national territory in the past has also influenced the ability of local governments to project legitimacy, elicit compliance, and facilitate cooperation among local citizens. In our analysis, we rely on a geocoded, historical dataset of 5,505 municipalities, including a variety of ethnoracial demography, state capacity, and economic geography variables combined with contemporary data on associational mobilization and trust. We find little support for the idea that a locality’s demographic composition in a given year affects local citizens’ trust, but we show strong evidence in favor of the notion that the “stock” of state capacity over the past century affects its levels of social capital, as well as its racial composition. Whereas previous research has assumed that citizens across the country experience their government the same way, we show that some groups have faced different constraints in accessing public resources and have had fundamentally different experiences when interacting with bureaucrats and elected officials. As a result, citizens’ expectations, their levels of trust, and social cohesion vary dramatically across communities with different historical relationships to governmental power, itself shaped by past levels of local state capacity. In other words, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between racial demography and trust is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.

Authors

• Giuliana Pardelli, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Alexander Kustov, University of North Carolina at Charlotte