Authors

Anneli Kaasa¹;  ¹ University of Tartu, Estonia

Discussion

It is well-known that the general trust levels are low in Eastern-European societies. But what is the reason for it? Is it the communist past? But not all countries with communist past have similarly low trust levels. Is it maybe the hierarchic character of the dominating religion? But there are also countries with hierarchic religion dominating and with quite high trust levels. How have the trust levels been shaped in Eastern European societies? This presentation introduces a study that investigates the determinants of general trust in a society and at that challenges the conventional paradigm of how to approach and analyse the determinants of a societal phenomenon, often materialised in a regression analysis. A novel method – fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) – is applied. In fsQCA, the idea that each independent variable has an autonomous influence on the dependent variable (such as in regression analysis) is abandoned and replaced with the assumption that several causes have to be combined for a certain outcome to occur. This means that we consider it possible that the recipe for high or low trust implies a combination of several conditions, and there can be different combinations that all produce the same outcome. fsQCA also relaxes the assumption of symmetry: conditions associated with low trust need not mirror conditions associated with high trust, with opposite signs. Various phenomena will be discussed as possible factors of trust, including income inequality, ethnic fractionalisation, how poor or rich a country is, cultural background, religiosity and character of religion, communist ideology, threat of infectious diseases. It is difficult to draw reliable conclusions when analysing only the Eastern European societies: a comparison-enabling background is needed. Hence, data about 79 countries were analysed using fsQCA in order to determine different combinations that would lead to low or high general trust. The results appear to show that for general trust in a society, the Anna Karenina principle seems to apply: all high-trust societies are alike, but for low trust levels, there are many recipes. At that, most Eastern-European countries fall into one unique group where trust has been shaped according to a similar recipe. In addition, some countries of our interest appear to have followed another route and some are outliers. The presentation will introduce all those cases in more detail, but also will draw generalised conclusions about the main determinants of the low general trust in Eastern European societies.