Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

The European Social Survey contains two questions on social trust, both measured on a
0-to-10 scale, with higher values indicating more trust towards other people. The question
formulations read as follows:
(1) “Using this card, generally speaking, would you say that most people can be
trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”, and:
(2) “Using this card, do you think that most people would try to take advantage
of you if they got the chance, or would they try to be fair?”.
In Figure 7-6 the two items were combined, resulting in a scale that ranges from 0 to 20,
and an average trust value per society was calculated. 54 The values are displayed at the x-
axis (see Appendix A7-3 for the distribution of the scale per society).
As a societal characteristic, the motivational aspect of social capital has also been
conceptualized as networks of trust that help to sustain the social cohesion in a society. A
society can thus be imagined as a sum of single trust circles where people are willing to
accept cooperative norms (Fukuyama 1999: 3). In societies where these “radii of trust”
(p.2) are large (meaning that they involve a lot of people), more social capital is available
to all members of a society. As a consequence, in high-trust societies the prevailing social
capital should be more productive in stimulating collective activism than in low-trust
societies. 55
54 Cronbach’s alpha for the added scale: 0.742.
55 For the concept of “high-trust societies” and “low-trust societies” see Fukuyama (1995).
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