Cuico progre confiado. How much does ideology influences the confidence that chileans place in others?

Abstract

Interpersonal trust is associated with positive attributes, such as social capital or the strength of democracy. In the great number of studies about the determinants of interpersonal trust, ideological identification has received less attention. Since people who identify ideologically tend to be more concerned about what happens in their own countries, it seems reasonable to expect them also to have a higher level of trust in their fellow citizens. In turn, because political identification is associated with dissimilar views about how different societies should function, as well as different positions on the importance of the individual and the collective, it seems reasonable that people identified with the left-wing would have higher levels of interpersonal trust. Using the 2014 COES survey for Chile, we evaluated how much the individual´s ideological identification influences the probability of knowing different people as well as the confidence one has in these people. We have shown that those who identify ideologically with one another have higher levels of interpersonal trust and that people of the left-wing have higher levels of trust than people of right-wing or center, regardless of the diversity attributes of the circle of people they know.