Rick K. Wilson

Rick K. Wilson, professor of political science at Rice University, will write a book that examines trust, ethnicity, and transitional political and economic systems. Transformations from authoritarian rule over the past 25 years have highlighted the critical role trust plays in shaping both democracy and markets. For his project, Wilson collected data from two regions in the Russian Federation that have waged campaigns for sovereignty and indigenous rights. Wilson will examine the scope of ethnic differentiation in education, jobs, incomes, and language use in each region and relate that to measured levels of altruism, cooperation, trust, reciprocity, and risk orientations of individuals in different ethnic and regional groups. Wilson will test various hypotheses about the extent to which trust is generalized across groups and the degree to which institutions mediate the potential for conflict.