The brutal wars in Iraq, Syria and now Ukraine have caused a massive influx of refugees to Europe. Turkey alone has received more than 4.8 million refugees. An important precondition for their economic and social incorporation is trust: refugees need to trust the citizens as well as the state and the justice system to find their place in the host country. Yet refugees’ propensity to trust may be affected by cultural differences between their home and host countries, their personal conflict (...) exposure and the experiences they had on the run. This study investigates how individual differences in exposure to armed conflict and institutional breakdown shape two types of trust among refugees: Generalized social trust and trust in the institutions of the settlement country. We survey a large and diverse sample of refugees from Syria and Iraq living in Turkish communities and deploy well-established measures of conflict exposure, posttraumatic stress, and posttraumatic growth. We find that higher degrees of conflict exposure are positively related to social trust, and to trust in courts and the police. These positive findings are largely driven by refugees who had very personal and emotionally powerful experiences. The psychological mechanism of posttraumatic growth cannot explain these findings, however, suggesting positive experiences of cooperation in the midst of war and displacement are potentially a better explanation for this finding than positive psychological changes resulting from trauma. At the same time, conflict exposure is negatively related to trust in political institutions. Posttraumatic stress may be the mechanism behind this result. We discuss the implications of these findings for the integration of war refugees—a topic that is tragically of great relevance today. (shrink)

While the importance of social and political trust has been well documented, there is a lack of scholarly consensus over where trust originates. This article tests three theoretical arguments – social-psychological, social-cultural, and political institutional – on the origin of political trust against three East Asian democracies. The empirical analysis from the AsiaBarometer survey illustrates that political institutional theory best explains the origin of political trust in East Asian cases. Citizens of these East Asian democracies have a high level of (...) political trust when they believe that their governments perform well in management of the national economy and political representation of elected officials. Meanwhile, social-psychological and social-cultural theories explain the origins of social trust, but not political trust. The evidence reveals that socially trusting people are not automatically politically trusting; social trust and political trust originate from different sources and do not transform from one to the other.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This paper synthesises a collaborative review of social capital theory, with particular regard for its relevance to the changing educational landscape within Scotland. The review considers the common and distinctive elements of social capital, developed by the founding fathers-Putnam, Bourdieu and Coleman-and explores how these might help to understand the changing contexts and pursue opportunities for growth.

The postwar welfare state provides social insurance against economic, health, and related risks in an uncertain world. Because everyone can envision themselves to be among the unfortunate, social insurance fuses self-interest and solidarism in a normative principle Friedman (2020) calls probabilistic justice. But there is a competing principle of status defense, where the aim is to erect boundaries between socioeconomic strata and discourage cross-class mobility. We argue that this principle dominates when inequality is high and uncertainty low. The current moment (...) is one of high inequality and high uncertainty, which results in intense status anxiety, yet does not rule out solidaristic solutions. Our contributions are to diagnose the causes of our current malaise, and to theorize the normative bases for the political choice facing contemporary western democracies. (shrink)