Trusting diversity: nationalist and multiculturalist orientations affect generalised trust through ethnic in‐group and out‐group trust

One premise of popular nationalism is that ascribing to a shared culture that enjoys a privileged political status enables us to construct the foundation that is vital to generating and supporting trust among members of the ethnic majority. Multiculturalism presumes that the accommodation of new minority cultures is conducive to trust. Utilising structural equation modelling, this paper distinguishes between ethnic in‐group trust (in the Danish context, trusting fellow Danes) and ethnic out‐group trust (trusting refugees and immigrants), in addition to a more generalised social trust towards unknown others. Previous studies in this field have not distinguished between these different dimensions of social trust. Results show that, vis‐à‐vis generalised trust, at the individual level, nationalism cannot compensate for lower trust towards immigrants with higher trust towards other Danes. There is some support for the ‘national identity’ argument, whereby nationalism, perceived shared values and in‐group trust are positively correlated. However, the net effect of nationalism upon generalised trust remains negative. By contrast, multiculturalism is associated with higher levels of in‐group trust and out‐group trust and ultimately of generalised trust.     

Urban transformation in Istanbul and Budapest: Neoliberal governmentality in the EU's semi-periphery and its limits

By discussing the variety and variability of urban neoliberal governmentality and its limits in the semi-periphery of the advanced capitalist world, the article aims to explore the embeddedness of neoliberalism at the dawn of the new millennium. Cities that are increasingly becoming parts of the global economy, despite being on the periphery of advanced capitalism, host a myriad of diverse forms of neoliberal governmentality in terms of spatial change. Although responding with enthusiasm to the increasing mobility of capital and the internationalization of investments through gentrification plans, the current transformative efforts of Istanbul and Budapest under two conservative governments indicate, for instance, the re-invention of authoritarianism so that these cities serve the purposes of their national leaders. This development signals a hybrid form of governmentality that combines neoliberalism with illiberal logics and manifests similar processes in different locations despite disparities in scale, local needs and characteristics. The article further argues that since such urban transformations take place within the neo-conservative leaders' battles to acquire cultural and social capital, they create potential to make both metropolises the new rebel cities of Europe, albeit with divergent levels of resistance.     

Faith no more? The divergence of political trust between urban and rural Europe

Events such as Brexit and the Gilet Jaunes protests have highlighted the spatial nature of populism. In particular, there has been increasing political divergence between urban and rural areas, with rural areas apparently having lost faith in national governments. We investigate this divergence using data on over 125,000 EU citizens from the European Social Survey from 2008 to 2018. We show that people in rural areas have lower political trust than urban or peri-urban residents, with this difference clear for six different forms of political institutions, including politicians, political parties, and national parliaments. There has been divergence of political trust between urban and rural Europe since 2008, although this is primarily driven by Southern Europe. While these results can partly be explained by demographic differences between cities and the countryside, divergent economic experiences, differences in values, and perceptions that public services are less effective outside of urban areas, there is a residual ‘rural effect’ beyond this. We argue that the polarisation of urban-rural political trust has important implications for the functioning of European democracies.     

The Contribution of Volunteering, Trust, and Networks to Educational Performance

Social capital can have a beneficial effect on public policy outcomes by helping to solve collective action problems and by providing individuals and communities with efficient social networks. In education, it also assists students' self-confidence, which can foster motivation and academic success. To investigate the social capital-outcome link, this article analyzes a panel survey of 15–16 and 16–17 year olds in 27 English schools, testing whether social capital, both at the individual and at the school levels, tends to increase grades and examination performance. The analysis concludes that individual-level trust and voluntary action improve pupil performance, but that the parental networks of some young people, particularly those from low socioeconomic status families, have negative rather than positive consequences. The findings add to a debate about the differential impact of social capital and the relative importance of its bridging and its bonding elements.     

Cultural shock of high-speed rail: Evidence from social trust

The opening of high-speed rail (HSR), as an exogenous shock, has had a profound and complex effect on social life. This study analyzes the effect of the opening of HSR on social trust. Results show that the opening of HSR promotes social trust. Mechanism analysis showed that although the opening of HSR accelerated population mobility and decreased trust in strangers, economic growth and improvement of local social issues mitigated the negative effects of its opening. In addition, our results also show that individuals turn to trust in their parents, neighbors, and doctors. Considering the potential endogeneity problem, instrumental variable and difference-in-differences estimators consistently indicated the promoting effect of the HSR opening on trust. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the opening of HSR had a greater effect on female, urban residents, younger groups, and married people. Last, cities with larger populations and tourist cities were more vulnerable to shocks.     

Cooperation without Trust: Overcoming Collective Action Barriers to Endangered Species Protection

Mutual trust among individuals is frequently cited as an important factor in encouraging collective action, particularly in environmental policy settings. Yet the precise role of trust in the collective action process remains uncertain. This article explores the hypothesis that trust is overrated as a cause of cooperation. It initially tests this hypothesis through two case studies of voluntary collective action in a new context: the creation of multiactor Habitat Conservation Plans to protect endangered species. The two cases suggest that institutional mechanisms and political leadership can play an important role in encouraging collective action without relying on trust among cooperators. Besides their theoretical implications, the results suggest policymakers might spend more energy on creating incentives and assurance mechanisms to encourage collaboration, rather than the potentially fruitless task of building of social capital among rival stakeholders.     

Government performance and dissatisfaction with democracy in Australia

ABSTRACT

Satisfaction with democracy has declined rapidly in Australia, reaching the lowest level recorded since the 1970s in 2019. Whereas Australian citizens used to be among the most satisfied democrats in the world, there is now evidence of widespread dissatisfaction. What explains this rapid decline in political support? Comparative studies emphasise the role of government performance, both political and economic, in shaping citizens’ attitudes towards the political system. This paper examines the role of government performance in shaping satisfaction with democracy in Australia, using Australian Election Study data from 1996 to 2019. The results demonstrate that frequent changes of prime minister, which a majority of voters disapproved of, and rising economic pessimism contributed to the decline of democratic satisfaction in Australia.     

The Artless Art: Leadership and the Limits of Democratic Rhetoric

Persuasion is vital to the practice of democratic leadership, making speech and communication of fundamental importance. Yet, democratic citizens habitually suspect political rhetoric as being either deceitfully empty or dangerously subversive. Rhetoric is thus central in democracy while paradoxically appearing either useless or pernicious. A consequence of this paradox for democratic leaders is that they are forced to avoid fine oratory in favour of a rhetorical style that sounds un-rhetorical, seeming to be plain factually-informative speech. This unique democratic form of rhetoric, which we have called an artless art, seeks to instil trust and to avoid appearing to talk down to the sovereign people. It is both helped and rendered problematic by the media, the essential communicative means in modern society, whose current dominance presents ever-new challenges and opportunities to democratic leaders.     

Do Minorities Trust Less? Understanding Differences in Social Trust among Canada’s Major Ethno-Racial Groups

Using data from Canada’s General Social Survey, this article assesses ethno-racial differences in social trust. Bivariate findings reveal that the three most culturally distinctive minorities—visible minorities, the French, and Indigenous Peoples—exhibit the lowest trust of all groups. Multivariate analyses show that controls for “ethno-cultural markers” (religion, language, immigration status), socioeconomic influences (education, income), and social engagement indicators (voluntary association activity, ethnic diversity of friendships) explain the lower trust between the French and, less so, among visible minorities. Socioeconomic factors partly account for lower trust among Indigenous Peoples, but they still express comparatively low social trust even with controls. The article discusses how interpretations focusing on “social distance” and “social boundaries” processes help in understanding social trust differences across Canada’s major ethno-racial communities.     

Imperial Citizenship or Else: Liberal Ideals and the India Unmaking of Empire, 1890–1919

ABSTRACT

This article examines three connected campaigns for Indian imperial citizenship which spanned the period 1890 to 1919, and their impact on the emergence of radical South Asian anticolonialism. It shifts our focus from individuals and ideologues who sought the status of British imperial citizens, to address the agitations which commenced to attain such a status within a reconstructed British Empire. Specific attention is paid to the conditions which encouraged South Asian patriots to imagine that the ideal of equal imperial citizenship within an imperial federation was a feasible political objective, to the illiberal official retreat from such an ideal, and to the political ramifications of this retreat. In conclusion, this article argues that the quest for Indian imperial citizenship, which spanned the Empire from South Africa to Canada, has been a much-neglected chapter in the evolution of anti-colonial nationalism in South Asia which deserves to be reinserted in the grand meta-narrative of the region’s twentieth century history.     

"On the Way": Reflections on Politics and Passion

Abstract

In Passion and Politics Michael Walzer explores two problems of liberal democratic theory: its refusal to acknowledge the place of passion in politics, and its difficulty in making place for involuntary associations (especially illiberal ones) that shape the character of citizens. Against a background of appreciation for his concerns and arguments, I ask whether his account of involuntary associations is sufficiently complicated or sufficiently rich metaphysically.     

Contested spaces of illiberal and authoritarian politics: Human rights and democracy in crisis

The global moral appeal of human rights and democratic governance appears to be in severe crisis. In both the Global North and the South, many countries have witnessed the rise of racist, sexist, and illiberal politicians into the highest positions in the government. As one of Asia's oldest electoral democracies, the Philippines is not an exception in this global pattern of decline in civil liberties and democratic governance. Considering the case of the Philippines, this article addresses the following core question: How and under which conditions do contestations as well as legitimations of the Duterte regime emerge across domestic and transnational spaces? This article examines the transnational and domestic contestations and legitimations of the Duterte regime based on a spatially-oriented analysis of the official results of the 2016 and 2019 elections, while demonstrating the multispatial contestations against and in support of global human rights and liberal democratic norms. While the role of geography and spatialization in the formation of illiberal and authoritarian politics remains underappreciated, this article contributes to the disciplinary fields of political geography, comparative politics, and International Relations. Specifically, the article deploys a spatial approach in understanding the territorially-contingent patterns of contestations and legitimations of liberal democratic politics.     

Imposition to agonism: Voluntary poverty alleviation resettlement in rural China

Implementation of voluntary Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) in Shanxi Province, rural China is a function of the democratic processes of village governance under the Organic Law of Villages Committees and Assemblies. Villages consult with their constituent households on the decision to resettle and aspects of the process of rebuilding homes and livelihood adaptations. This article analyses the participatory process through an analytic of government that exposes the contingency of local governance as liberal techniques are negotiated amongst historical illiberal governance norms. Processes of subjection during resettlement decision making and implementation defy a liberal/illiberal binary as the effects of power during governance can have a duel nature. These effects produce dialectical tensions that the local Party-state draws on to smooth consent for their political economic goals. Villagers in response draw on multiple political and economic subjectivities to reposition themselves and contest intersubjective norms that define relations between governor and governed. Contestation is most aptly defined as agonism which represents the permanent provocation (Foucault, 1982) between liberal and illiberal governance and the potential for equitable resettlement outcomes.     

Measuring the Creativity of a City: A Proposal and an Application

Cities are considered to be the major drivers of the global economy for many reasons, including their creative and innovative potential in generating sustainable economic growth. Istanbul is one of the global cities searching for a long-term growth strategy. This paper starts with a modest effort of composing an index to be used in the evaluation of the creative potential of cities. Our proposed index, “global creative index”, consists of five main criteria: (1) creativeness, (2) innovativeness, (3) intellectual development, (4) global network connectivity and (5) world cityness emphasizing multinational corporate economy, international division of labour and high intensity of producer and financial services. The use of the index is illustrated through the comparison of nine cities: Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto. The analysis of these nine cities shows that Istanbul is building an innovation environment, but it still lacks research and development infrastructure, technical support and investment in higher education. This comparison offers guidelines for policy-makers to sketch the growth of Istanbul along the lines of creativity and innovativeness.     

Priming political trust: Evidence from an experiment

Political trust is one of the most researched areas in political science. Yet little is known about what causes political trust to vary. Past research has relied almost solely on survey data, and focused on exploring the correlation between political trust and various micro- and macro-level factors. This research note reports the findings from an experiment designed to examine the causal effect of one of the most commonly cited causes of political trust: political probity. Results show that political trust and trust in specific institutions change when participants read an article about political probity and complete a word-association task. The treatment we used is low cost, straightforward and may be used by other researchers to alter political trust in experiments.     

Marginalized for a lifetime: The everyday experiences of gulag survivors in post-Soviet Magadan

Over the past decade notions of social capital have become embedded in the social development lexicon, often presented as the ‘missing link’ within development theory. Much social capital‐based research takes Robert Putnam's theorization of the subject as its starting point. Putnam's work argues that social capital can be measured by a region's levels of trust and civic engagement. While its use, and conceptualization, has undergone much academic debate, often formal institutions still employ this very narrow, and arguably Western‐centric, reading of the subject. This paper argues that while at the micro‐level social capital has little to do with the civic engagement and trust theories posited by Putnam, it still has relevance to the lives of marginalized individuals and is an important factor in their continued survival. To explore this, drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted in Magadan, Moscow and St Petersburg, I critically examine the construction of everyday survival strategies among Gulag survivors living in Russia's far northeast city of Magadan. Denied a return to their ‘homeland’ upon their release, this group experienced considerable marginalization in the post‐Stalin period. This was exacerbated when the collapse of the Soviet Union saw pensions in the far northeast of Russia fall to below 50% of the state‐set subsistence minimum. The paper demonstrates the importance of social capital to this group by showing how their survival is based on far more than interactions with formal and informal organizations.     

Dimensions of social trust and national identity: Addressing a multifaceted relationship

Social trust is crucial for the functioning of societies and states as well as for the wellbeing of individuals. In this article, I expand on previous literature and scrutinise the role of definitions of group membership in the form of national belonging as a key predictor of three distinct dimensions of social trust: particularised trust, trust in strangers and identity-based trust. Drawing on recent data from the European Values Study, I find that stronger ethnic conceptions of nationhood are related to higher identity-based trust, whereas the reverse holds for trust in strangers. The latter relationship, however, must be qualified regarding majority conceptions at the respective national level. Results for particularised trust, however, point towards a more complex relationship than outlined in the theoretical expectations. Thus, this article contributes to extant literature by presenting a comprehensive argument linking all three dimensions to conceptions of nationhood challenging simplified notions of generalised trust. Further, I go beyond extant studies by combining conceptions of nationhood at the individual level with several country-level variables to demonstrate the robustness of the results.     

Rousseau,Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century natural law tradition

The relationship between the political theory of Rousseau and modern natural law continues to be the subject of debate, both with regard to Rousseau's faithfulness to the idea of natural law itself and regarding the precise extent of the debt he owed to his predecessors. In this article the author re-examines this relationship by focusing attention on what has been defined as the protestant tradition of natural law. In particular she concentrates on the political and theoretical exercise that Jean Barbeyrac had sought to perform by constructing a particular version of this tradition, namely that of using the science of natural law to promote a policy of tolerance between protestants and to justify the right of citizens to resist catholic sovereigns who denied them religious freedom, as well as the right of protestant countries to come to the aid of persecuted fellow believers. The thesis asserts that Rousseau was fully aware of this exercise, just as he was aware that some of Barbeyrac's ideas had been adopted and reworked by another illustrious Genevan, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a member of the Small Council, to support anti-populist and antidemocratic politics in Geneva. Viewed in this way it is possible to perceive in Rousseau's political thought not so much a “first crisis” of natural law as an intention to reformulate this science from a republican perspective in order to derive rigorous principles of political law from it. And in developing his republican political theory Rousseau took up and overturned the analysis of democratic sovereignty carried out by Pufendorf, who in opposing the “pro-monarchist” excesses of authors such as Hobbes and Horn had unhesitatingly demonstrated the complete validity of democratic sovereignty.     

Political trust and residents’ support for alternative and mass tourism: an improved structural model

ABSTRACT

Political trust is a key requirement for tourism policies to flourish and sustain. The purpose of the research was to investigate the determinants of political trust and analyze whether the latter influences residents’ support for mass and alternative tourism. To this end, we develop a structural model based on the social exchange theory, institutional theory of political trust, and cultural theory of political trust. The model proposes six determinants of political trust which in turn is considered to influence residents’ support for mass and alternative tourism. Data were collected from residents’ of Mauritius selected using a stratified random sampling approach. We used a survey method based on a structured questionnaire. Using AMOS, the data were subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis to determine the fit of the measurement model. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model. Results indicated that such variables as the political and economic performance of government in tourism, interpersonal trust, and tourism benefits significantly predicted political trust. In turn, the latter was found to influence residents’ support for mass tourism only, lending support to Hetherington sacrificed-based concept borrowed from political science. The theoretical contribution of the study relates to the inclusion of the political trust variable to analyze its relationship with residents’ support for two opposing types of tourism development in a single theoretical model. We found that such relationship is contextual, depending on the object of exchange, conceptualized in here as the types of tourism residents are asked to support. Political trust figures more prominently for mass tourism than for alternative tourism given the considerable amount of sacrifices residents have to make to accommodate mass development. Our findings suggest that it is important for government to foster political trust among local people for tourism development to sustain.     

POPULATION GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC PLANNING

Population geographers are urged to get involved in the program of socio-economic planning that is expected to supplement the present economic planning process in the Soviet Union. So far socio-economic plans have been drawn up only for a few large cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk. In general, there is a need for integrating the social planning process with purely economic planning, and to supplement the present sectoral planning system with an integrated system of spatial planning entities. At the present time, city and regional plans are derived by simply collating sectoral data at the city and regional level rather than by a separate integrated spatial planning procedure. A system of intra-oblast regions, or okrugs, numbering perhaps 500 or more, is recommended as a new level suitable both for government administration and for socio-economic planning.