Can We Trust Education for Fostering Trust? Quasi-experimental Evidence on the Effect of Education and Tracking on Socia
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Can We Trust Education for Fostering Trust? Quasi‑experimental Evidence on the Effect of Education and Tracking on Social Trust Marcus Österman1,2 Accepted: 23 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Education · Social trust · Tracking · Education reform · Causal inference
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-020-02529-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Marcus Österman [email protected] 1
Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
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Uppsala Center for Labor Studies, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
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Present Address: Box 514, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
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M. Österman
1 Introduction Social trust relates to a plethora of positive outcomes ranging from economic growth to political participation (Bjørnskov 2012; Uslaner and Brown 2005). Because social trust is such a valuable quality, the research community has exerted substantial effort to explaining differences in social trust. While many different explanations have been proposed, hardly any single factor has been stressed more than education (e.g., Helliwell and Putnam 2007; Easterbrook et al. 2016; Rothstein and Uslaner 2005). Hundreds of studies have asserted that more highly educ
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