nosis, and, like a skilled investigator, he traces down the problem’s deep roots. But in the end, the readers are left to grapple with contemporary implications on their own. ‘‘The word credit in the retail business is a sign to a dangerous road that has led many a merchant to disaster, but a road which must be traveled’’ (p. 77). These were the 1904 words of a certain J. E. R. Chilton, the founder of the Chilton Company, which was to become a leader in the computerization of consumer reporting and eventually was purchased by Experian. At the turn of the past century, it was the merchants who had no choice but to sell on credit, despite the costs they paid—either in unpaid or protracted bills or in efforts to minimize them. Today, it is the consumers who have no choice but to swap access for being surveilled, while the data are used to calibrate their future access through ‘‘classification situations’’ (Fourcade and Healy 2013). This engaging and richly documented book will no doubt be of great interest to scholars and students of consumer credit, credit surveillance, and financial identity in the United States.

Trust and Power

A crisis of democracy

A review of the literature has highlighted that some studies have defined an indicator of trust regarding one’s geographical community, but that few studies refer to the community, in relation to the role of its social interactions used to attain and promote personal and collective planning. Therefore, this study introduced community trust as a composite indicator used to measure community opportunities, as perceived by citizens, in addition to discovering their local culture. A third-order construct model was proposed, specifying community trust as a multidimensional construct, which is composed of two different domains: Community Action Orientation and Community Future Opportunities (CFO). Each domain was considered separately, although they are integral parts of community trust. The results showed that the proposed model performs well in measuring community trust. All blocks of variables indicated good internal consistency, and factor analysis results were consistent with the hypothesized dimensions in each block. Furthermore, the social ties indicator, known as sense of community, was measured using the Italian-version of the Sense of Community Scale. Factor analysis was applied to analyze data and to provide an indicator for sense of community. Finally, through a logistic regression, the relationship between both community trust and sense of community with community engagement were analyzed. We found that community trust is significantly associated with community engagement, while sense of community is not. The proposed community trust indicator offers some guidance to urban planners and local governments, when promoting urban development, social empowerment, and community wellbeing.

Community Trust: A Social Indicator Related to Community Engagement

This paper describes the results of an international initiative on trust (Trustlab) run in six OECD countries between November 2016 and November 2017 (France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Slovenia and the United States). Trustlab combines cutting-edge techniques drawn from behavioural science and experimental economics with an extensive survey on the policy and contextual determinants of trust in others and trust in institutions, administered to representative samples of participants. The main results are as follows: 1) Self-reported measures of trust in institutions are validated experimentally, 2) Self-reported measures of trust in others capture a belief about trustworthiness (as well as altruistic preferences), whereas experimental measures rather capture willingness to cooperate and one’s own trustworthiness. Therefore, both measures are loosely related, and should be considered complementary rather than substitutes; 3) Perceptions of institutional performance strongly correlate with both trust in government and trust in others; 4) Perceived government integrity is the strongest determinant of trust in government; 5) In addition to indicators associated with social capital, such as neighbourhood connectedness and attitudes towards immigration, perceived satisfaction with public services, social preferences and expectations matter for trust in others; 6) There is a large scope for policy action, as an increase in all significant determinants of trust in government by one standard deviation may be conducive to an increase in trust by 30 to 60%.

Trust and its determinants: Evidence from the Trustlab experiment

How can declining political trust in Western democracies be explained, especially, when it remains stable and high in authoritarian societies? Underlying this question is a debate about whether pol...

Finding critical trusters: A response pattern model of political trust:

Do standard "trust in government" survey questions deliver measures which are reliable and equivalent in meaning across diverse regime types? I test for the measurement equivalence of political trust in a sample of 35 former Soviet and European countries using the 2010 Life in Transition Survey II conducted by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Employing multiple group confirmatory factor analysis, I find that trust perceptions in central political institutions differ from (1) trust in regional and local political institutions, (2) trust in protective institutions like the armed forces and police and (3) trust in order institutions like the courts and police. Four measurement models achieve partial metric invariance and two reach partial scalar invariance in most countries, allowing for comparisons of correlates using latent factors from each model. I also found some clustering of measurement error and variation in the dimensionality of political trust between democratic and autocratic portions of the sample. On some measurement parameters, therefore, respondents in diverse cultures and regime types do not have equivalent understandings of political trust. The findings offer both optimism and a note of caution for researchers using political trust measures in cross-regime contexts.

/pdf/can-we-trust-measures-of-political-trust-assessing-5b5joxo06j.pdf

Irena Schneider

Papers

Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust? Assessing Measurement Equivalence in Diverse Regime Types