trust, social capital and human capital
TRANSCRIPT
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Bo Rothstein
The Quality of Government Institute
Department of Political Science
University of Gothenburg
and
The Blavatnik School of Government and Nuffield College
Oxford University
Trust, Social Capital and Human Capital
www.qog.pol.gu.se
The Quality of Government Institute
Started in in 2004 (building database)
Major funding from 2007, 2009, 2013, about 12 mil. euro.
About 20 researchers + 6 PhDs + 6 assistents
Two world leading open access major cross-country
databanks
Regional databases
QoG Expert Survey
Working papers, published articles, data at
www.qog.pol.gu.se
www.qog.pol.gu.se
Aim and Focus
• To carry out and promote research about the
importance of trustworthy, reliable, impartial,
competent, non-corrupt, non-discriminatory
government institutions = QoG
• QoG is about the exercise, not the access of political
power
• Central focus is not to explain politics or public policy,
but what politics and public policy imply for human
well-being
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This talk is based on three papers:
• Uslaner, Eric M., and Bo Rothstein. 2016. "The Historical
Roots of Corruption. State Building, Economic Inequality, and
Mass Education." Comparative Politics 49
• Charron, Nicholas, and Bo Rothstein. 2016. “Does Education
Lead to Higher Generalized Trust? Testing the Mechanism of
Institutional Quality on Trust.” QoG Working Paper 2016:1
• Rothstein, Bo, Marcus Samanni, and Jan Teorell. 2012.
"Explaining the welfare state: power resources vs. the Quality
of Government." European Political Science Review 4
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The Questions
• How to explain the huge variation in social trust
between individuals, regions and countries
• How to explain the huge variation in corruption
between countris
• Understanding the nexus of education, social
trust and corruption (low QoG)
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• Education 1870 and Corruption 2010
NIG
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ETH
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CANSWZ
24
68
10
Corru
ption
20
10
0 2 4 6Mean School Years 1870
r2 = .699 N = 78
Corruption 2010 by Mean School Years 1870
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A decisive break with the past
• Mass education “signaled a decisive break with the voluntary
and particularistic mode of medieval and early modern
education, where learning was narrowly associated with
specialized forms of clerical, craft and legal training, and
existed merely as an extension of the corporate interests of
the church, the town, the guild and the family. Public
education embodied a new universalism which acknowledged
that education was applicable to all groups in society and
should serve a variety of social needs. The national systems
were designed specifically to transcend the narrow
particularism of earlier forms of learning. They were to serve
the nation as a whole” (Green 1990)
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All About State Capacity
• Why the logic of economic theories does not work
• If Marxist theory (demand from the capitalist logic of
production) or Modernization Theory (demand from logic of
industrialization) would explain the introduction of mass
education, the UK would have been the first country to
introduce such reforms
• But the UK was a late comer to free mass education
• Instead, it is semi-feudal, militaristic, junker-dominated
Prussia that is the pioneer and who’s system becomes the
”role model” for the industrialized world.
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The QoG Regional Surveys
• 2010 survey of 34000 people in 174 EU regions
• 2013 survey of 84000 people in 212 EU region
• Telephone survey with ”next birthday method”
• Questions aimed at capturing citizens’ perceptions
and experiences with corruption, and the extent to
which they rate their public services as impartial and
of good quality + the social trust question
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The Trust – Education Puzzle
• Uslaner: ”The single best predictor of social
trust and virtually every type of participation is
education.”
• Helliwell and Putnam: “increases in average
education levels improve trust and do not
reduce participation”
• BUT NOT EVERYWHERE!
• So, why does education have a positive impact
on trust in some societies but not in others?
• Education is only measured in the amount of
time, not what happens during the education
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The QoG survey questions
• How would you rate the quality of public education (health
care system, police force) in your area?
• The public education (etc..) gives special advantages to
certain people in my area.
• All citizens are treated equally in the local public
schools(etc.) in my area
• Corruption is prevalent in my area’s local public school
system (etc.)
• How often do you think other people in your area use
bribery to obtain other special advantages that they are not
entitled to?
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Experience based question
• In the past 12 months have you or anyone living in
your household paid a bribe in any form to (a)
Education services? (b): Health or medical services?
(c): Police? d) any other public service?
• Generally speaking, would you say that most people
can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in
dealing with people in your area?”
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Education is a public policy that is very
vulnerable to ”bad implementation”
• 59 percent of the population in Eastern Europe perceives
education in their country to be corrupt or extremely
corrupt
• Shadow schools, teacher absenteeism and “ghost
teachers,” bribes for access to education, the buying of
grades, nepotism in teacher appointments, fake
diplomas, private tutoring in place of formal teaching,
bribery for on-campus accommodation, misuse of funds,
and sexual exploitation in exchange for grades and
exams, etc. etc.
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Results I
Stunning differences in social trust in Europé between and within countries
• Between EU regions from 8 percent trusters in the Východné Slovensko region in Slovakia to 80 percent in the Copenhagen region in Denmark
• Within country differences, Schleswig-Holstein 66 percent, Saarland 36 percent
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Blue/black = high QoG – Yellow/green=low QoG
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SESESE DKDKDKDKDK
UKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKFIFIFIFIFI ATATATATATATATATAT IEIE NLNLNLNLNLNLNLNLNLNLNLNL
ITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITITDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDEDE
ESESESESESESESESESESESESESESESESES
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HUHUHU
CZCZCZCZCZCZCZCZSKSKSKSK RSRSRSRSRSmean: 0.42
standard dev.: 0.19
0.2
.4.6
.8
0 5 10 15 20Trust by Country Rank
regional estimates pop. weighted country estimates
Social Trust in 22 European Countries and Regional Variation
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Results II
Education in general spurs social trust
But not everywhere. Educations has a negligible (or even a slightly
negative) effect in several countries in the study - Serbia, Turkey,
Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Ukraine, and Ireland.
At low values of QoG, the probability of generalized trust is
remarkably low, irrespective of education level attained (less than 0.4
in all cases), while at high levels of QoG, even respondents with the
lowest level of education (less than secondary) are greater than 50%
likely to display social trust.
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Results III
Someone with a post-tertiary education in a low QoG
region would only be roughly 42 percent likely to “trust
others,” while an otherwise similar respondent with post-
tertiary education in a high QoG region would be 66
percent likely to “trust others.”
The difference between otherwise similar respondents
between post-tertiary and less than high school education
in the low region in Belgium (Wallonia) is 0.18, while in
the high QoG region (Flanders), the gap in trust is more
than double, 0.42
•
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Theory: The Causal Mechanisms
• People will have to use heuristics when defining their attitude about social trust
• When answering the general trust question, people make a moral evaluation of the society in which they live
• Reasonable to believe that this evaluation of people in general is informed by heuristics information about local public servants
• ”Der Fisch Stinkt vom Kopf her”
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The Natural Experiment from Denmark
• “”The results show that having experienced fair teachers has a
much stronger impact on trust than parental socialization of
values for first and second generation immigrants. In other
words, immigrants’ perceptions of fairness of Danish
institutions appear to be primarily rooted in concrete
experiences with teachers – some of the first street-level
bureaucrats that children encounter – treating everyone
equally. This further substantiates the experiential perspective
on trust.” (Dinesen, Peter Thisted. 2012: When in Rome, Do
as the Romans Do. Diss. Aarhus
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Getting to good schools. What does it take?
• Activity in voluntary associations?
• Hardly any empirical support
• Center-left governments?
• Some evidence from public spending but only explains part of
the variation
• High QoG ?
• For public spending on social programs explains as much as
political dimension
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The results from the European Social Service
• A person in Europe who agrees that the government should take
measures for reducing difference in income levels and who agrees
that income differences should be small
• But who thinks that the tax administration and/or the public health
system is incompentent, inefficient and unfair in treating people
equaly, this person is more likely to
• Support lower taxes and less public spending
• And the opposite is also the case !
• Thus, ideology is not enough for support for more public spending on
education if QoG is low.
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Ethnic Diversity, QoG and Social Trust
• Many and very varied empirical results
• QoG Regional Survey plus data from Eurostat
• Ethnic Diversity measured as percentage in region born
outside Europe
• In general, more ethnic diversity less social trust
• But, the whole effect of ethnic diversity disappears when we
control for QoG
• In high QoG regions, ethnic diversity does not decrease social
trust – this only happens in low QoG regions
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Conclusions
• Free, reasonably high quality mass education do increase
social trust
• This goes also for immigrant students in high trust
countries that are form countries with very low social
trust
• But, education is a policy sector that is vulnerable to
many forms of corruption
• Experiencing much education in low QoG countries has a
negative impact on social trust
• Political mobilization for increased spending on education
will be very difficult in low QoG countries
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