Trust and Volunteering Selection or Causation Ev

Authors: René Bekkers

Publish Date: 2011/04/09

Volume: 34, Issue: 2, Pages: 225-247

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Abstract

Participation in voluntary associations is often believed to make citizens more trusting of others This paper reports longitudinal analyses of a time intensive form of participation—volunteering—and generalized social trust using data from three waves of the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Study spanning 4 years 2002–2006 n = 692 refuting this belief Trust is relatively stable over a 4 year period 073 Changes in volunteering are not related to changes in trust Trust is higher among volunteers mainly because of selective attrition persons with low trust are more likely to quit volunteeringVoluntary associations are the back bone of civil society When people get together organize group activities collaborate to reach collective goals endorsed by many fellow group members and share their experiences they create a sense of community for themselves and for others People enjoy being a part of groups in which people work together and they will reciprocate with similar behaviour In these groups members will develop positive relations with each other and positive beliefs about the intentions and attitudes of their fellows What could be a more natural product of such voluntary action than trust in othersArguments like these have been made by numerous philosophers social scientists politicians policy makers and community leaders Robert Putnam has become widely known with the claim that there is a close connection between generalized social trust a ‘yes’ to the statement “In general most people can be trusted”—henceforth ‘trust’ and civic engagement membership and activity in voluntary associations In Bowling Alone Putnam 2000 p 137 we read that “civic engagement and trust are mutually reinforcing” and “the causal arrows among civic involvement … and social trust are as tangled as welltossed spaghetti” This was a theoretical argument Putnam argued that civic engagement has a positive socialization effect volunteering promotes trust In addition he acknowledged that trust may also promote volunteering Both selection as well as causation may produce the relationship between civic engagement and trust Selection refers to the effect of trust on civic engagement Trusting individuals may be more likely to join and be active in voluntary associations Causation refers to the socialization effect of civic engagement on trust This paper disentangles selection and causation using longitudinal panel data from a random sample of the Dutch populationIf trust promotes volunteering and volunteering promotes trust we should observe a relation between trust and civic engagement that is ‘clear and robust and not unduly reliant on a particular data set or a particular model specification’ Claibourn and Martin 2000 However the evidence is far from clear and robust The relationship between trust and measures of civic engagement of individuals is usually weak at best and in some countries trust is not related to civic engagement at all Delhey and Newton 2003 While many studies have found a positive correlation between trust and membership in voluntary associations Brehm and Rahn 1997 Dekker 2003 Delhey and Newton 2003 Putnam 2000 Scheufele and Shah 2000 Uslaner 2002 the correlation is rather weakWhat is wrong with the Putnam argument Why is civic engagement so weakly related to trust Recent studies on the link between trust and civic engagement have focused largely on two potential answers to this question First of all it may be that only some types of organizations promote trust while others do not Stolle 1998 Stolle and Rochon 1998 Hooghe 2003 Secondly it may be that only intense forms of civic engagement affect trust and not mere membership or ‘checkbook activism’ Newton 1999 Wollebaek and Selle 2002 The two possibilities which are not mutually exclusive are tested in the present paper using a longitudinal panel survey and appropriate regression modelsMore than 40 years ago David Horton Smith 1966 noted that only longitudinal data may disentangle socialization and selection effects a call he repeated in 1975 Smith 1975 However previous studies on civic engagement and trust have been conducted almost exclusively with crosssectional data There are only a few exceptions eg Claibourn and Martin 2000 to the rule that studies on the link between civic engagement and trust are based on crosssectional data Using crosssectional data relationships between trust and civic engagement can be interpreted from processes of selection as well as causation Even sophisticated techniques such as two stage least squares regression analyses a technique used by Brehm and Rahn 1997 do not rule out the possibility that unobserved variables are driving the results Illustrating this point Uslaner 2002 used the same dataset as Brehm and Rahn 1997 and showed that including more or different variables leads to profoundly different conclusionsEchoing David Horton Smith’s calls Stolle 2003 p 25 describes the solution to the problem “Ideally one would track association members over time in order to filter out the separate influence of group membership on trust controlling for selfselection effects” This is exactly the approach of the present paper In addition to the use of a prospective panel survey tracking individuals over time this paper contributes to the literature by testing hypotheses on the development of trust through civic engagementA first reason why voluntary action does not promote trust is because trust is a pretty stable characteristic of persons that is not amenable to change Rotter 1967 Uslaner 2002 Some people just seem to be trusting persons ‘by nature’ and continue to be trusting persons throughout their entire lives Uslaner 2002 calls them ‘trusters’ Others—distrusters—keep on seeing the dark side of human nature in everything other people do There are several psychological reasons for the stability of trust One reason is that trust is correlated with basic personality traits that are stable over the life course In terms of the ‘Five Factor Model’ of personality trust is a facet of agreeableness Graziano and Eisenberg 1997 or may even be the sixth basic dimension of human personality Ashton and Lee 2001 Trust is also known to be correlated with two other of the ‘Big Five’ trusters are less neurotic Ross et al 2002 and more extraverted Couch and Jones 1997 than distrusters Previous research is mute on the relationship between trust and the two other dimensions of personality openness to experience and conscientiousness However it is likely that openness to experience is positively related to trust Openness to experience is negatively related to political intolerance Flynn 2005 which is negatively related to trust Deutsch 1958 Rosenberg 1956 Because personality characteristics are highly stable over the life course Roberts and DelVecchio 2000 it is also likely that trust is a stable characteristic of persons

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