Reassembling the Radius: Trust and Marginality across East-Central Europe

• In Event: 3465 - Social Capital and Trust

Abstract

Scholars conceive of trust as a matter of the distance between the actor doing the trusting and the object of trust, distinguishing trust in familiar individuals from trust in unfamiliar others. These two spheres of trust – the particular and the generalized – are conceived together as a radius of trust and an important determinant of social capital. Research has consistently found that members of marginalized groups have lower generalized trust, but has not tracked the effects of marginality across the radius. This paper reassembles the levels of trust into the same model, and tracks the effects of marginality across the trust radius. We find that while belonging to a marginalized ethnicity increases the odds of having no one to trust, it has no effect on generalized trust. The negative effects of belonging to a marginalized ethnicity instead begin at particular trust. Our models therefore offer a more precise understanding of the radius of trust, and of how individuals experience and respond to inequality.

Author

• Laura Upenieks, University of Toronto