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Who are Your Joneses? Socio-Specific Income Inequality and Trust
[journal article]
Abstract Trust is a good approach to explain the functioning of markets, institutions or society as a whole. It is a key element in almost every commercial transaction over time and might be one of the main explanations of economic success and development. Trust diminishes the more we perceive others to have... view more
Trust is a good approach to explain the functioning of markets, institutions or society as a whole. It is a key element in almost every commercial transaction over time and might be one of the main explanations of economic success and development. Trust diminishes the more we perceive others to have economically different living realities. In most of the relevant contributions, scholars have taken a macro perspective on the inequality-trust linkage, with an aggregation of both trust and inequality on a country level. However, patterns of within-country inequality and possibly influential determinants, such as perception and socioeconomic reference, remained undetected. This paper offers the opportunity to look at the interplay between inequality and trust at a more refined level. A measure of (generalized) trust emerges from ESS 5 survey which asks “...generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”. With the use of 2009 EU-SILC data, measurements of income inequality are developed for age-specific groups of society in 22 countries. A sizable variation in inequality measures can be noticed. Even in low inequality countries, like Sweden, income imbalances within certain age groups have the potential to undermine social trust.... view less
Keywords
difference in income; income situation; confidence; social stratification; perception; inequality; social inequality; age-specific factors; Europe
Classification
General Sociology, Basic Research, General Concepts and History of Sociology, Sociological Theories
Free Keywords
Income inequality; Stratification; European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC UDB 2010 - version 5 of March 2014); European Social Survey 5 (ESS 5) 2010
Document language
English
Publication Year
2017
Page/Pages
p. 877-898
Journal
Social Indicators Research, 134 (2017) 3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1460-9
ISSN
1573-0921
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed