Donna L. Bahry
Department of Political Science
Penn State University
dbahry@psu.edu
Sam Whitt
Department of Political Science
Vanderbilt University
Rick K. Wilson
Department of Political Science
Rice University
Houston, TX
rkw@rice.edu
Abstract
Transitions from authoritarian rule over the past 25 years have highlighted the critical role of trust in shaping both democracy and markets. In the political realm, interpersonal trust promotes civic engagement and community-building, and institutional trust helps to overcome the dilemmas of collective action (Fukuyama, 1995, Putnam, 2000; but see Sobel, 2002). In economic life, trust fosters cooperation and thus facilitates impersonal exchange.
Transitional societies, however, typically have a shortage of trust in both domains. Old authoritarian governments bred social atomization; and old state-directed economic institutions bred protectionism and corruption. The lack of trust is especially dramatic in post-communist countries: As, Mishler et al., 1998 demonstrate, levels of trust for both institution and people are substantially lower than in Western Europe. Yet postcommunist citizens are not completely devoid of faith in other people. Gibson, 2001 shows, for example, that Russians tend to have a generalized suspicion of institutions and of strangers, bur high levels of "in-group" trust-of their own family, friends, and ethnic groups. Much of the work on trust in transitional countries relies on attitudinal data that taps one dimension of trust. This project turns to a behavioral measure of trust and sorts between explanations based on norms, ethnicity, gender and age.
This research focuses on two Russian Republics, Tatarstan and Sakha (Yakutia), that have potential for ethnic unrest. Drawing our subjects from a random sample of the population in each Republic we ran a trust experiment based on the investment game reported by Berg et al., 1995. Our design allows us to test for the effects of ethnicity, village life and intergenerational differences.
