Unknown is unloved? Diversity and inter-population trust in Europe

Debby Gerritsen and Marcel Lubbers
Additional contact information
Debby Gerritsen: Utrecht University, The Netherlands, D.Gerristen1@uu.nl
Marcel Lubbers: Utrecht University, The Netherlands

European Union Politics, 2010, vol. 11, issue 2, 267-287

Abstract: With more than 400,000 trust evaluations, we examine inter-population trust in the European Union. We focus on social capital theory explanations in a context where European inhabitants from 20 countries rate trust in the populations of 27 other European countries and in their own national population. We emphasize the role of ethnic heterogeneity, but we extend the research by studying the importance of the presence of specific European migrants in a country for trusting this population as a whole. Moreover, we consider the relation with the citizen’s country and characteristics of the trusted populations’ country. We use the European Election Studies, showing that diversity is important for explaining trust in other populations and trust in one’s own population — but opposite to what is expected by Putnam.

Keywords: cross-national comparison; ethnic diversity; European Union; social capital; trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116510363311 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:11:y:2010:i:2:p:267-287

DOI: 10.1177/1465116510363311

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().