Are Joiners Trusters? A Panel Analysis of Participation and Generalized Trust

Abstract

As two sides of the same coin - namely that of social capital - civic engagement and social trust have been conceived of as interrelated concepts. Existing studies examine whether civic participation is causally linked to generalized trust. However, the empirical evidence remains ambiguous: partly due to multidimensional measurement and partly in response to inadequate statistical analyses. The contribution of this paper, which uses the Swiss Household Panel data set between 2002 and 2012, is to analyze the causal relationship between participation in associations and generalized trust. Dynamic Panel Models account for the reciprocity of trust and participation with lagged dependent and lagged endogenous independent variables. The positive results support a causal effect of civic participation on generalized trust and show that joiners are trusters a priori, but also that they become trusters as they join.