Explaining Trust in a Cross-National Comparative Perspective: Society-centered versus Institution-centered Approach
Volume 13, Issue 4, Autumn 2013, Pages 60-89
M. Sharepour, M. Fazeli, E. Eghrarian
Abstract While the problem of social capital is getting more important in all social science disciplines, explaining the creation of social capital rises as an important debate. Trust is a constituting element of social capital and has great importance for its consequences. Robert Putnam, in a leading prominent book, two decades ago, explained trust as a consequence of associational life, which is now acknowledged as society-centered approach. However, institution-centered approached have tried to explain trust based on the quality of public institutions. We have applied a crossnational variable-oriented comparative research on 54 countries to evaluate the strength of these two approaches for explaining trust. Data have been extracted from well-known international databases of the World Bank, Freedom House, and World Values Survey. Our evidences and results imply that institution–centered approach is more capable of explaining trust. In conclusion, the implication of results for analyzing democracies, and two critical issues of legitimacy of democratic systems and degradation of social capital have been discussed.