Education and trust: A tale of three continents

Date01 November 2019
DOI10.1177/0192512118779184
Published date01 November 2019
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512118779184
International Political Science Review
2019, Vol. 40(5) 676 –693
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512118779184
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Education and trust: A tale
of three continents
Cecilia Güemes
Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), Spain
Francisco Herreros
Institute for Public Goods and Policies, Spanish National Research Council (IPP-CSIC), Spain
Abstract
To date, most research finds education to have a positive effect on trust. Education increases people’s
social intelligence, making them better able to distinguish between trustworthy and opportunistic types.
Alternatively, education allows people to attain privileged social status, making them more resistant to
deceit and exploitation by opportunistic types. In this article we show that this is not always the case.
The relationship between education and trust is mediated by state efficacy; where the state is relatively
efficacious, trustworthy types largely survive, while the opposite is true with relatively weak states. In weak
states, highly educated people should be the least trustful. We empirically demonstrate this theoretical
insight with survey data from three continents, Europe and Africa at the extremes and Latin America in
the middle. We provide some indirect evidence in favor of social intelligence as the key mechanism linking
education and trust.
Keywords
Trust, state efficacy, education, Europe, Africa, Latin America
Introduction
There is a wide variation in levels of trust across countries. There are societies where people rou-
tinely trust strangers, economic transactions are conducted without cumbersome paperwork and
free riding is an infrequent event. At the other extreme, there are countries where trust is limited to
closed networks of friends, acquaintances, or members of an ethnic group. Within countries, there
is also variation between individuals in their predisposition to trust strangers: the country-level
differences between high-trusting societies and those where people do not dare to trust beyond the
boundaries of their own closed networks is mimicked in within-country variation in levels of trust
Corresponding author:
Cecilia Güemes, Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), Calle Madrid, 126 28903 Getafe, Madrid, Spain.
Email: cguemes@clio.uc3m.es
779184IPS0010.1177/0192512118779184International Political Science ReviewGüemes and Herreros
research-article2018
Article
Güemes and Herreros 677
between individuals of different social strata. How can we explain this variation? Explanations at
the country-level include economic inequality (Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005) and government
effectiveness (see Robbins, 2011). At the individual level, education is usually considered a good
predictor of trust: more educated people, through mechanisms probably related to the development
of ‘social intelligence’ – the capacity to read the social environment and to distinguish trustworthy
from untrustworthy individuals – are usually more trusting than the low educated. As it is claimed
in a recent study, ‘it is an almost universal finding that there is a strong and positive relation
between education level and trust’ (Hooghe et al., 2012: 609).
In this article we claim that in complex societies, state efficacy is an umbrella under which the
individual propensity to trust, driven by variables such as education, can be understood. Education,
we argue, will be positively related to trust only in countries blessed with highly efficacious states;
by contrast, in relatively inefficient states, both the lowly and the highly educated will show mini-
mum levels of trust. The key to these differential patterns of trust across countries lies, we will
argue, in the capacity of states to protect trustworthy types from being exploited by opportunistic
types. We define trustworthy types as individuals with pro-social preferences – altruists who care
about others and strong reciprocators, people willing to reciprocate cooperation and to sanction
opportunistic individuals even at a cost to themselves. In small, simple societies, trustworthy indi-
viduals can be protected from exploitation by opportunistic agents through decentralized sanctions.
In more complex, large societies, by contrast, the state is necessary for the trustworthy types not to
be crowded out. In failed states, pro-social preferences will die out, and opportunistic types will
predominate in the population. This variation in the capacity of state institutions to protect trust-
worthy individuals affects the relationship between individual-level variables such as education
and trust. Contrary to what is usually claimed in literature related to this subject, the relationship
between education and trust is not universally positive; in failed states, where pro-social prefer-
ences are lacking, highly educated individuals will probably trust less than the lowly educated, as
they are more capable of discerning the distribution of types in society. By contrast, in efficacious
states, where pro-social individuals largely survive, the highly educated will be considerably more
trusting than the lowly educated. There is, in sum, an intervening effect of state efficacy on the
relationship between education and trust.
We test these ideas by comparing the patterns of the relationship between trust and education in
three continents: Europe, Latin America and Africa. They can be placed on a continuum of state
efficacy, going from relatively high state efficacy (Europe) to weak (Africa), with Latin America
somewhere in between. Our analysis shows that, according to our expectations, education has a
strong positive relation to trust in Europe while showing a considerably weaker positive relation-
ship in Latin America and a substantially negative relationship in Africa.
Literature review and theory
Our idea is that the relationship between trust and education depends on the degree of state effi-
cacy. In efficacious states, more educated people will be more trusting than lowly educated people,
while, at the other extreme, in weak states, either there will be no relationship between the two
variables (as no one will trust, regardless of how educated they are) or it will be a negative one. By
state efficacy we mean the infrastructural capacity of the state to enforce its laws, norms and regu-
lations. This is slightly different to the concept of ‘quality of government’, which stresses the idea
of impartiality in the exercise of public power, although the two could indeed be related to each
other, as impartiality in the recruitment of the public service can positively affect state efficacy
(Rothstein, 2011: 31). In the rest of this section we will develop this hypothesis further. It rests
basically on three building blocks: a definition of trust, an argument on the role of the state in

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