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- Österman, Marcus, 1982-
(author)
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Can We Trust Education for Fostering Trust? : Quasi-experimental Evidence on the Effect of Education and Tracking on Social Trust
- 2021
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In: Social Indicators Research. - : Springer Nature. - 0303-8300 .- 1573-0921. ; 154:1, s. 211-233
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Education is one of the most commonly proposed determinants of social trust (generalized trust). Nevertheless, the empirical evidence of a causal relationship between education and social trust is inconclusive. This study contributes to this discussion in two ways. First, its design provides strong grounds for causal inference across multiple countries by exploiting numerous European compulsory schooling reforms. Second, it considers how the structure of education, specifically between-school tracking, impacts the relationship between education and social trust. The article argues that less tracking is positive for social trust because it entails intergroup contacts between children with different social backgrounds. The results do not give support for a general positive effect of education on social trust as the effect of reforms that extend compulsory education is positive but small and not statistically significant. However, reforms that reduce tracking have a somewhat larger, but still modest, positive and statistically significant effect on social trust. The effect is more pronounced for individuals with poorly educated parents. The positive effect of detracking reforms goes hand-in-hand with more understanding attitudes towards persons with a different background than one’s own. The lack of a clear effect of reforms that extend compulsory schooling on social trust reinforces the findings of recent single-country studies that have been unable to confirm a causal effect of education on social trust. However, the effect of detracking reforms, albeit modest, shows that education can have a positive effect on social trust but that the institutional character of education may be a conditioning factor.
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| 2. |
- Österman, Marcus, PhD, 1982-, et al.
(author)
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Does high unemployment mobilize the unemployed? Evidence using Swedish register data
- 2021
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In: Socio-Economic Review. - : Oxford University Press. - 1475-1461 .- 1475-147X. ; 21:1, s. 341-365
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article contributes to recent scholarship on the effects of economic hardship on political participation, and particularly on the issue of how individual and contextual effects interact. More specifically, we study whether the effect of individual unemployment on turnout depends on the level of aggregate unemployment. In contrast to most existing researchers on this topic, we argue that contextual unemployment may reinforce the negative effects of individual unemployment. We also contend that previous studies have not adequately considered how the composition of the unemployed population differs across times of high and low unemployment. Our empirical approach uses state-of-the-art Swedish register panel data, which gives us good opportunities to control for the selection of the unemployed population over the business cycle. We find that once this problem of dynamic selection is taken into account, the negative effect of individual unemployment on electoral turnout is actually stronger in high unemployment contexts.
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