Executive Summary: “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement” by Mitchell Brown and Eric M. Uslaner

Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone suggests that the key components of social capital–civic participation and generalized trust–form a syndrome of civic virtue. “The causal arrows among civic involvement, reciprocity, honesty, and social trust are as tangled as well-tossed spaghetti,” Putnam claims. However, in The Moral Foundations of Trust, Uslaner shows that trust is a moral value that is largely independent of experience, especially participation in voluntary associations and in political life. Trust is a value that bonds us to people who are likely to be different from ourselves, while membership in civic groups and especially political participation link us to people who are similar to ourselves. The key exceptions, Uslaner finds analyzing survey data for individuals, is for volunteering and giving to charity–both of which establish bonds to people who are likely to be different from ourselves.

Trust, in turn, depends (at the aggregate level) on the level of economic equality in a society. Societies with more equitable income distributions have stronger social bonds across socio-economic lines. Greater economic inequality leads to more optimism for the future and a greater sense of control over one’s fate, both of which are key determinants of trust.

How do trust and inequality come together to shape civic and political engagement? This is a difficult question to answer because trust is measured at the individual level and inequality at the aggregate level. We construct aggregate measures of trust by state from multiple national surveys and we also construct aggregate measures of political and civic participation using the same methodology. Our measures of political participation are voting, attending political meetings, and signing petitions. Our civic measures are volunteering and giving to charity.

We estimate models of both political and civic engagement through two-stage least squares with the state as the unit of analysis. We test to see whether trust leads to greater participation and to whether participation leads to greater trust–and to the role of inequality in producing less trust. Our first equations for each participation measure predict trust from measures of participation, inequality, optimism, religious fundamentalism, and education levels. Our second equations predict participation from trust, inequality, government responsiveness, education, attendance at religious services, and labor union membership.

As Uslaner found for both the United States over time and across nations without a legacy of Communism in The Moral Foundations of Trust, the level of inequality in a state is a strong predictor of generalized trust. Participation levels do not predict trust, regardless of whether they are political or civic. The level of trust predicts charitable giving and volunteering, but not the political participation measures, which are largely determined by attitudes toward government responsiveness (and to a lesser extent by attendance at religious services). Inequality generally does not predict participation either–its effects are indirect, through trust, for charitable giving. We do, however, find a direct linkage between inequality and volunteering: When inequality is high, volunteering is the most needed–but is also scarce.

We thus find support for the argument that trust and forms of civic engagement that lead to “bonding” rather than “bridging” are independent of each other. Instead, trust only matters for social connections that link us to people who may be different from ourselves.