The autocratic roots of social distrust☆

Social trust is an important fabric of society that makes economies.² The sources of social trust, on the other hand, are equally important. It is well known that distant political history shapes contemporary social trust (Tabellini, 2008a).³ What is less well understood, however, is how autocracy affects social trust. In this paper, we identify a new source of social distrust: an individual's autocratic origin. We show empirically how an individual's inherited autocratic culture affects her generalized trust and political participation and how the effect of inherited autocratic culture evolves in democratic institutions.

Autocracy is the most common form of government throughout human history. It has profound, yet overlooked, influence on social capital formation. Autocratic regimes repress civic engagement (Almond and Verba, 1963) and hence hinder the formation of social capital since social capital is created through civic engagement (Putnam, 1993). In addition, under autocratic regimes, people often face the choice of siding with the state or with their fellow citizens, being subject to state punishment should they choose the latter, which diminishes generalized trust (Uslaner, 2003). Moreover, autocratic countries often lack economic equality and equal opportunity (Moore, 1966, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2005). When significant social inequality prevails, social trust will be stifled because of the large divides within a society (Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005). Therefore, we argue that autocratic rule should adversely affect generalized trust and political participation (i.e., civic engagement).

To test our hypothesis, we look for differences in generalized trust and political participation among individuals who reside in the same democratic destination countries in the U.S. or Europe, but whose ancestors (or they themselves) came from different source countries with different autocracy levels. This epidemiology approach is formalized in Fernández, 2007, Fernández, 2008 and Giuliano (2007) and has been applied to various studies to explore the links between home-country culture and individuals’ economic preferences and behaviors in destination countries.⁴

To estimate the impact of autocratic culture on trust and political participation, we match the autocracy index in the Polity IV database to measures of trust and political participation from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the European Social Survey (ESS) by individuals’ countries of origin and their ancestors’ times of immigration. As expected, we find that autocratic culture has a significant negative impact on generalized trust. In particular, individuals from autocratic countries are less likely to trust others. This effect remains strong even after we control for a wide range of individual characteristics, time-invariant culture traits such as religion, and source country characteristics such as GDP per capita, education, and the strength of family ties in the U.S. (the results in the European sample are sensitive to the inclusion of GDP per capita and education). More interestingly, we find that the effect of autocratic culture on trust lasts for at least three generations in the U.S. This persistent negative impact of inherited autocratic culture on social trust is stunning, which suggests the resilience of autocratic culture in democratic institutions.

In addition, the inherited autocratic culture suppresses voter turnout in democratic countries, but this negative effect dissipates more quickly than the effect on trust – it disappears in the second generation. We will discuss some possible mechanisms that may explain these differences after we present the empirical findings.

Our finding that the effect of autocratic culture persists is consistent with Putnam's observation that the effect of culture can last for a long time. Yet, our study provides new insights about how culture survives in new institutional environments. In Putnam's original thesis, culture persists by co-evolving with its original institution, whereas in this paper, we provide evidence that autocratic culture can persist in democratic institutions.

Our study directly contributes to the study of formation and transmission of social capital following the line of research by Putnam, 1993, Glaeser et al., 2002, Guiso et al., 2008, Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011, Alesina and Giuliano, 2010, Alesina and Giuliano, 2011 among others.

Our study further contributes to the literature on the intergenerational transmission of culture by examining different effects of autocratic culture on trust across generations. Bisin and Verdier, 2001, Tabellini, 2008b, and Guiso et al. (2008) provide a theoretical explanation for cultural transmission across generations. Using the GSS, Giavazzi et al. (2016) provide an extensive examination of decay of trust and other beliefs by immigrants of different generations. Our study differs from Giavazzi et al. (2016) in several aspects. First, we examine changes in autocratic culture under positive shock (i.e., being in democratic institutions) rather than the decay of autocratic culture itself. Second, in addition to trust and beliefs, we also examine the impact of culture on behaviors such as political participation. Third, we focus on the effect of autocratic culture on trust and political participation over time, not on how trust decays over time.

Closest to our study is Tabellini (2008a) where he shows that distant political history in the country of origin affects contemporary trust of descendants in the U.S. In that study, he uses Constraints on the Executive and a generic institutional measure (the Polity IV score) which ranges from −10 (extreme autocracy) to 10 (perfect democracy) as measures of political history. However, how different forms of political systems affect trust remains unclear. Instead of using the Polity IV score, we focus on countries’ autocracy levels and examine how the inherited autocratic culture survives and changes in democratic institutions. Our study contributes to the literature by providing direct evidence of the negative impact of autocratic culture on social capital formation and political participation. In addition, while Tabellini (2008a) assigns each country of origin a time-invariant institutional measure, we allow autocratic institutions in the source country to change with times of immigration. This gives a more accurate measure of the inherited autocratic culture, which helps isolate the effect of autocratic institutions from the impact of other slow-moving cultural components in the home country.

Obtaining a more precise understanding of how beliefs and attitudes of immigrants from autocratic countries evolve over time is important for many reasons. Immigrants’ attitudes and beliefs can shape the policies of the countries to which they migrate via political participation, so it is important to know the pace at which they converge to those of the natives. In addition, because trust is a key determinant of economic outcomes, including economic growth, knowing the sources and dynamic evolution of trust will help explain the time path of growth in the host country. We should stress that although the negative effect of autocratic culture on trust persists for at least three generations, we observe a very fast convergence between the first- and second-generation immigrants in trusting others. This suggests that exposure to democratic institutions can improve generalized trust among individuals, which is a very positive implication.

The outline of the paper is as follows. Section II discusses the empirical strategy. We present our main findings using the General Social Survey in Section III and additional findings using the European Social Survey in Section IV. Section V presents the results from several robustness checks. Section VI concludes.