A Network Analysis of Global Trust Across 11 Democratic Countries

Trust is seen as a glue in modern societies that facilitates economic prosperity and political functioning (e.g., Fukuyama, 1995; Newton, 2001; Putnam, 2000; see a more critical view of trust in Warren, 1999). In this literature, there exists a conventional division between social and political trust, as they are believed to have different foundations (e.g., Uslaner, 2002, 2018) and therefore should be treated as distinct concepts. However, more recently, the interconnected nature of trust has been increasingly acknowledged: Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli (2018) argue that social and political trust are “closely tied together in a mutually reinforcing manner that underpins social harmony, economic efficiency, and democratic government” (Newton et al., 2018, p. 2; see also Newton & Zmerli, 2011). Consistent with this idea, Liu, Milojev, Gil de Zúñiga, and Zhang (2018) propose a Global Trust Inventory (GTI), which captures “a system of meaning that encompasses both the subcomponents of and an overall grasp of the risks of opening oneself up to a range of dependencies on others” (p. 790). Here we introduce network analysis as a relatively novel and useful tool to empirically examine the interconnectedness of multiple types of trust derived from the GTI.