Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on November 16, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(4):706-724; doi:10.1093/poq/nfn054
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Social Trust and Attitudes Toward Democracy
Address correspondence to Ken Newton; e-mail: Knewton{at}soton.ac.uk
In spite of the great importance attached by social capital theory to the role of social trust in maintaining stable and effective democracy, research has produced rather weak and mixed support for the idea that the socially trusting individuals tend to be politically trusting, and the weight of evidence suggests either a weak or insignificant relationship between social and political trust. The present work, however, reports robust and statistically significant correlations between generalized social trust, on the one hand, and confidence in political institutions and satisfaction with democracy, on the other. The associations are significant in 23 European countries and in the United States. This article argues that its findings are more accurate and more reliable than much of the previous work because they are based on better and more sensitive measures. The results pose a dilemma for future survey work, while reopening possibilities for social capital research.
SONJA ZMERLI is with the Institute of Political Science, Darmstadt University of Technology, Residenzschloss, D-64283 Darmstadt, Germany, and also with the Institute of Social and Political Research, Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Robert-Mayer-Strasse 5, 60054 Frankfurt/Main, Germany. KEN NEWTON is with the Department of Political Science, University of Southampton and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Reichpietschufer 50, D-10785 Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany. Ken Newton would like to acknowledge the Nuffield Foundation for a timely grant that helped enormously with this project and the Political Science Program of the Australian National University for a visiting fellowship that gave him valuable time to work on this article without distractions. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped them improve the article.