Gated Communities as a Form of Interpersonal Distrust? A Statistical Scrutiny of Existing Hypotheses

• In Event: Posters II

Abstract

Gated communities (GC) are housing areas that have been enclosed in one way or another, typically involving heavy use of surveillance technology (see Addington & Rennison, 2015). They were first described in the early 90s (McKenzie, 1994; Blakely & Snyder, 1997). Since then they have been focal points of several research projects (Low, 2003; Glasze, 2003). There is a number of publications covering the increasing number of GC in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after democratization of formerly communist societies (Bodnar & Molnar, 2009). In the post-communist context, a general lack of trust, the increasing socio-economic polarization, and the existential insecurity created in the democratization process have been forwarded as potential explanations for the rapid expansion of GC. However, these hypotheses derive exclusively from qualitative studies and yet await quantitative scrutiny.
The project Like Fish in Water: Surveillance in Post-Communist Societies commissioned field work in Estonia, Poland, and Serbia during Winter 2014-15. A representative and probabilistic sample of 1000 respondents from each country were interviewed face-to-face on matters of trust, security, surveillance and a range of contextual aspects, among others GC. That enables us to evaluate existing hypotheses on the expansion of GC in the CEE from a statistical perspective.

Authors

• Pawel Waszkiewicz, University of Warsaw

• Ola Svenonius, Stockholm University

• Fredrika Bjorklund, Södertörn University