How far does the radius of trust extend?

I’ve long wanted to read a paper on this topic and I just ran across a 2011 essay in the American Sociological Review, by Delhey, Newton, and Welzel.  Most papers on trust work with general questionnaire responses, but those queries often conflate whether you trust the people you know, or the people who surround you, with whether you trust your government and other larger social institutions.  You can imagine for instance that a country could have strong interpersonal trust at the micro level but also lots of cynicism about its establishment power structures.

The innovation of this paper is to compare micro trust measures with macro trust measures and see where there are big differences.  Not surprisingly, the most trusting coutries, such as Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, score high on both the micro and macro measures of trust.

The countries where asking the macro question makes the biggest difference in overall trust rank are South Korea (falls 18 places when macro considerations are considered explicitly), Thailand (falls 17 places), and China and Romania.  Argentina, Poland, and Slovenia gain the most in their relative trust rankings when the radius of trust is brought into play.  In general, when we account explicitly for the macro governance dimension, Asian countries decline in the trust rankings and Latin countries go up in the trust rankings by some modest amount.

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