Historical Legacies and the Radius of Trust

Guangpu Chen, Washington and Lee University
Jonathan Eastwood, Washington and Lee University

Francis Fukuyama (1995) defined the “radius of trust” as the extent to which trust declines as the social distance between truster and trustee increases. He further argued that trust radius is strongly shaped by historical and cultural legacies, which has proven difficult to test empirically. In this paper, we employ a novel strategy for estimating trust radius and then work with data from waves 5 and 7 of the World Values Survey to examine the extent to which (a) trust radius is a stable, country-level phenomenon and (b) country-level differences in trust radius are explained by historical legacies. Preliminary results suggest strong persistence in country-level patterns and that cultural zones reflecting historical trajectories (Inglehart and Welzel 2005) are strongly predictive of country-level trust radius, net of other country characteristics.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 33. Trust in Uncertain Times: Substantive and Methodological Reflections