Mewes Jan, Fairbrother Malcolm, Giordano Giuseppe Nicola, Wu Cary, Wilkes Rima
Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden.
Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Sweden; Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Austria.
Soc Sci Res. 2021 Mar;95:102537. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102537. Epub 2021 Feb 9.
The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006-2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects linear regression models suggest that all but social ties matter. We then use 1973-2018 GSS data to predict trust based on observed values for unemployment, confidence in institutions, and satisfaction with income, versus an alternative counterfactual scenario in which the values of those three predictors are held constant at their mean levels in the early 1970s. Predicted values from these two scenarios differ substantially, suggesting that decreasing confidence in institutions and increasing unemployment scarring may explain about half of the observed decline in US social trust.
近几十年来，美国社会信任度大幅下降。令人惊讶的是，很少有研究分析个体层面的解释是否能说明这种下降。我们使用综合社会调查（2006 - 2014年）的三波面板数据，研究社会信任变化的四个可能的个体层面来源的影响：失业、社会关系、收入以及对政治机构的信心。固定效应线性回归模型的结果表明，除社会关系外，其他因素都有影响。然后，我们使用1973 - 2018年综合社会调查数据，根据观察到的失业、对机构的信心和对收入的满意度数值来预测信任度，并与另一种反事实情景进行对比，在反事实情景中，这三个预测变量的值保持在20世纪70年代初的平均水平不变。这两种情景的预测值有很大差异，表明对机构信心的下降和失业创伤的增加可能解释了美国社会信任度观察到的下降的大约一半。
