 Social Trust, Social Capital and Perceptions of ImmigrationFrancisco Herreros and Henar Criado Political Studies, 2009, vol. 57, issue 2, 337-355 Abstract: Analyses of social capital and immigration have stressed the negative impact that culturally diverse societies have for the development of social trust. Ethnic heterogeneity, according to these studies, is associated with lower levels of social trust. However, social trust has not been studied as an independent variable in order to explain attitudes towards immigration. This article argues that societies with high levels of social capital facilitate the integration of immigrants because those members with high levels of social trust will tend to have more positive attitudes towards immigration. This hypothesis is empirically tested in a cross‐country multi‐level empirical analysis for sixteen European countries, drawing on the 2002–3 European Social Survey. This analysis shows that, regardless of the impact of other individual‐level variables and contextual variables such as levels of unemployment or percentage of foreign population, those with high social capital do exhibit more positive attitudes towards immigration than the rest of the population. Date: 2009 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:polstu:v:57:y:2009:i:2:p:337-355 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association |
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