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Who Trusts Others

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TLDR
The authors found that the strongest factors associated with low trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences; ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (blacks in particular) and women; iii) being economically unsuccessful in terms of income and education; iv) living in a racially mixed community and/or in one with a high degree of income disparity.
Abstract
Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using individual level data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors associated with low trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences; ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (blacks in particular) and, to a lesser extent, women; iii) being economically unsuccessful in terms of income and education; iv) living in a racially mixed community and/or in one with a high degree of income disparity. Religious beliefs and ethnic origins do not significantly affect trust. The role of racial cleavages leading to low trust is confirmed when we explicitly account for individual preferences on inter-racial relationships: within the same community, individuals who express stronger feelings against racial integration trust relatively less the more racially heterogeneous the community is.

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Citations
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References
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Book

Foundations of Social Theory

TL;DR: In this article, a new approach to describing both stability and change in social systems by linking the behavior of individuals to organizational behavior is proposed. But the approach is not suitable for large-scale systems.
Journal ArticleDOI

“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

TL;DR: Putnam as discussed by the authors showed that crucial factors such as social trust are eroding rapidly in the United States and offered some possible explanations for this erosion and concluded that the work needed to consider these possibilities more fully.
Journal Article

Bowling alone, america's declining of social capital

TL;DR: The Johns Hopkins University Press is committed to respecting the needs of scholars as discussed by the authors, and return of that respect is requested. But no copies of the below work may be distributed electronically, in whole or in part, outside of their campus network without express permission (permissions@muse.jhu.edu).
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Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions

TL;DR: This article showed that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa, and that high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.
Journal ArticleDOI

The quality of government

TL;DR: The authors investigated empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries and found that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance.