Jong-sung You Paper on Trust Across Countries
Social Trust: Fairness Matters More Than Homogeneity
10/02/2012
Jong-sung You,
Political Psychology
This article explores whether homogeneity or fairness better explains generalized interpersonal trust across countries. Although some research suggests that ethnic diversity and income heterogeneity have a negative impact on social trust, I argue that cross-national variations in social trust are better explained by fairness: fair procedural rules (democracy), fair administration of rules (freedom from corruption), and fair income distribution (relatively equal but also unskewed). This expectation is confirmed by a multilevel analysis of data from the World Values Surveys and European Values Study covering 170,000 individuals in 80 countries.
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Professor Jong-sung You is co-director of the Korea Pacific Program. Along with Professor Stephan Haggard, Professor You also leads the Korean Regional Concentration Program with participation from Director Emeritus Lawrence Krause and Professor Susan Shirk. His research focuses on Korean politics, comparative politics, political sociology, and comparative public policy. He teaches graduate courses on Korean politics and justice, development, and public policy, and an undergraduate course on corruption, inequality, and democracy. Before pursuing an academic career, he worked for democratization and social justice in South Korea. He was Director of Policy Research and later, General Secretary for Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice, an influential NGO in Korea.
