This page has a sampling of papers that I have written that are available for downloading. Most are available in Adobe Acrobat format, some also in WordPerfect or Word. If you don’t have the Adobe Acrobat reader, click here to download it for free.

See also the new page with vintage papers!

Focus on trust, inequality, and corruption --

see my page page devoted to my corruption research and my book, Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008, paper 2010, order here:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521874892

See also my page on research on diversity, segregation, trust, and altruism

Most of the papers are on trust and civic engagement, and inequality, which is the focus of my research.

My new paper with Bo Rothstein, "The Roots of Corruption," traces contemporary corruption to levels of education across 78 countries in 1870.  We argue that higher levels of education both stem from and promote economic equality, which leads to less corruption.  We find strong evidence for path dependence--countries with high levels of education in 1870 are more likely to be equal today and equality is a key determinant of low corruption.  Higher levels of education are also indicative of state capacity--and better governance.

See two papers on the foundation and measurement of trust, "Measuring Generalized Trust: In Defense of the Standard Question," in Handbook of Research Methods on Trust, second edition, edited by Fergus Lyon, Guido Mollering, Mark Sanders, and Tally Hatzakis; and "The Roots of Trust," in Yaojun Li, ed., The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications on Social Capital.  London: Edward Elgar, 2014.

"All for All: Equality, Corruption, and Social Trust" (with Bo Rothstein of Goteborg University).  In this paper, which was published in World Politics, v. 58 (October 2005), 41-72.  We argue that means-tested welfare programs reduce levels of generalized trust--and that universalistic policies lead to greater trust.  Means-tested policies stigmatize recipients, while universalistic policies reflect the ideal of equality underlying generalized trust.  Download the paper as published in PDF format.

I show that the economic crisis of 2008 shaped trust in government but not generalized trust in my paper, "The Economic Crisis of 2008: Trust in Government and Generalized Trust," in Jared D. Harris, Brian Moriarity, and Andrew C. Wicks, eds., Public Trust in Business (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

My work also extends to other areas, including legislative and electoral behavior.   See my paper, with Mark Lichbach, "Israel and Evangelicals: The Two Front War for Jewish Votes."  We pose a familiar question--why American Jews continue to vote Democratic when most other groups in the New Deal coalition have become less loyal to the Democratic party.  Traditional explanations focus on the liberalism of American Jews.  We provide support for this argument, but argue that an increasingly important reason for the loyalty of Jews to the Democratic party is fear of evangelicals, who have become more powerful in American society and especially within the Republican party.  Non-Jews were did not base their vote choices on attitudes toward fundamentalists.  For non-Jews views of the Christian Right were tied in closely to other culture war issues (ideology, abortion, gay unions, and gun control)--while for Jews, attitudes toward evangelicals were more of an issue of identity than of a culture war over social issues.

Some Jews voted Republican and Jewish Bush voters were distinctive in seeing Israel as the first or second most important issue in the campaign.  We analyze Jewish voting behavior using a survey of American Jews conducted in 2004 for the National Jewish Democratic Council by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and we compare our findings with results for non-Jews using the 2004 American National Election Study.

Download the non-technical summary of the paper here and our op-ed in The Forward here.

I extend this work to the 2012 elections using an election night survey conducted for J Street.  Again, Jews voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates and their vote choices were largely based upon traditional partisanship and opposition to the Tea Party--and not to positions on Israel.  The Republican attempt to sway Jewish voters through advertizing had no effect--it may have even backfired--and Jewish voters' positions on Israel were closer to those of President Obama than to Republican Mitt Romney.  See "What's the Matter with Palm Beach County?," presented at the Conference on "The U.S. Presidential Election: Campaign and Results," Interdisciplinary Center, Herzilya, Israel, January 6-7, 2013; and a less technical paper written for a volume to be published by the Casden Institute of the Jewish Role in American Life at the University of Southern California (http://casdeninstitute.usc.edu/), "American Jews and the Elephant Question."

Many discussions of trust argue that it mitigates risk.  I show that this is indeed the case in "Trust as an Alternative to Risk,"  published in Public Choice,  157 (2013): 629-639.  Trusting people are less likely to see their neighborhoods as dangerous even if there is a real risk of violence (based upon statistics from police departments).  Using the 1996 Pew survey of metropolitan Philadelphia, I show that trust reduces perceptions of risk controlling for being the victim of a crime, parental warnings not to trust others, the neighborhood one lives in, and whether someone watches local television news.

Oguzhan Dincer and I show that there is indeed a robust relationship between trust and economic growth across the American states.  See our article, "Trust and Growth," in Public Choice, 2010, 142: 59-67.

Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Geoffrey Layman, and I have investigated the roots of Americans' sentiments toward Muslim-Americans (under revise and resubmit to the Journal of Politics.  We argue that Americans rate Muslims much as they rate other out-groups, especially illegal immigrants, gays and lesbians, people on welfare, and feminists--and also other minority groups, including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and Jews.  People who rate Jews and even Israel highly are more likely to have positive feelings toward Muslims.  And there is little clear relation between fear of terrorism and attitudes toward Muslims--and we show that the same syndrome of out-group attitudes preceded the 9/11 attacks.  The paper was published in the Journal of Politics, 71 (November, 2009).  Download the paper, "A 'Band of Others'? Attitudes toward Muslims in Contemporary American Society."

How persistent is generalized trust?  "Where You Stand Depends Upon Where Your Grandparents Sat: The Inheritability of Generalized Trust” was published in Public Opinion Quarterly, 72, 2008.  Using a person’s ethnic heritage (where their grandparents came from) and the proportion of people of different ethnic backgrounds in a state, I ask whether your own ethnic background matters more than whom you live among. People whose grandparents came to the United States from countries that have high levels of trust (Nordics, and the British) tend to have higher levels of generalized trust (using the General Social Survey from 1972 to 1996). People living in states with high German or British populations (but not Nordic populations) are also more trusting (using state-level census data). Italians, Latinos, and African-Americans also tend to have lower levels of trust, but it is not clear that country of origin can account for these negative results. Overall, there are effects for both culture (where your grandparents came from) and experience (which groups you live among), but the impact of ethnic heritage seems stronger.

How should we measure trust?  Traditionally the "standard question" is a dichotomy--either we say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people.  Now several people say that the dichotomy is problematic and that an eleven-point scale is preferable.  I reexamine this issue and find that eleven-point scales (as well as seven-point scales and even five-point scales) are subject to the problem of "clumping," or excessive selection of the midpoints on the scales.  I examine data from the American National Election Studies 2006 Pilot survey, the European Social Survey, and the Citizenship Involvement Democracy Surveys in Romania and the United States.  The dichotomous measure stands up well compared to the "newer" measures. Download the paper here.

Read my part of a debate with Sjoerd Beugelsdijk over what trust means.  Is it merely a surrogate measure for good institutions or is it a moral value?  See his paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics and my response, "The Foundations of Trust: Macro and Micro," in the same journal (2008).

In The Moral Foundations of Trust, chs. 5 and 8, I argue that generalized trust does not stem from government, but that trust can generate better government performance.  In "The Civil State:
Trust, Polarization, and the Quality of State Government" (in Jeffrey Cohen, ed., Public Opinion in State Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 142-162, I examine the link between generalized trust and the performance of government in the American states.  Using measures from the Government Performance Project of Governing magazine and the Maxwell School of Citizenship at
Syracuse University, the Ford Foundation/Kennedy School awards for government performance, and measures of corruption in the states (from reporters' perceptions), I find generally strong linkages between trust and government performance--especially for corruption.  Legislative polarization also leads to less effective state government, though there is less evidence that mass polarization matters.

In "Trust as a Moral Value," in Dario Castiglione, Jan W. van Deth, and Guglielmo Wolleb, eds., Handbook of Social Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101-121, I summarize my work on trust in The Moral Foundations of Trust.  The paper is short and non-technical: I focus on the different types of trust (generalized trust, particularized trust, strategic trust) and discuss whether--and how--government might shape trust.

Why do businesspeople pay taxes?  In "Tax Evasion, Corruption, and the Social Contract in Transition," in James Alm, Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, and Benno Torgler, eds., Tax Compliance and Tax Evasion (London: Routledge), I use the Business Enterprise and Environment Performance Surveys (BEEPS) conducted for the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 2002 and 2005 to examine this question.  Both firm-level and aggregate analyses indicate that businesses are most likely to evade taxation if they believe that the level of corruption is high and if they see the level of public services as unsatisfactory.  High levels of trust lead to greater tax compliance, while increasing economic inequality leads to more tax evasion.

Another of my papers continues my work on civility in Congress. "Is the Senate More Civil Than the House?" (pdf version) was prepared for the Conference on Civility and Deliberation in the Senate, sponsored by the Robert J. Dole Institute and the Pew Foundation, July 16, 1999.   It was published in Burdett Loomis, ed., Esteemed Colleagues (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2000).  Also see my testimony and prepared statement on "Civility in the House of Representatives" to the House of Representatives Rules Committee Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House, April 17 and Mary 3, 1997. 

On September 26, 2004 I participated in a panel on Legislative Civility at the Western Committee on the Future of Western Legislatures in conjunction with the Council of State Governments/CSG-West.  Download my handout to delegates in Word format.

Thomas Zittel of the University of Mannheim and I have written an analytic essay on recent research on legislatures in our paper, "Comparative Legislative Behavior," forthcoming in R.A.W. Rhodes, Sarah Binder, and Bert Rockman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Many other papers and my Russell Sage grant proposal are currently available and the interim report for my Starr Foundation/IREX grant are available:

On September 20, 2002 I gave the keynote address to a conference on "Trust in the Knowledge Society" at the University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland. (The same paper was delivered at Oxford University on February 14, 2003 and at the University of Haifa, June 10, 2003 and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, June 12, 2003).  Download the paper, "The Moral Foundations of Trust," which comes from my book of the same name.  The paper is in both WordPerfect and PDF formats. 

Also available: "Trust as a Moral Value," presented at the Conference, "Social Capital: Interdisciplinary Perspectives," University of Exeter, United Kingdom, 15-20 September, 2001 and to be published in a revised version in Dario Castiglione, Jan van Deth and Guglielmo Wolleb, eds., Handbook of Social Capital (Oxford University Press, 2004) as a Word file. This revised version summarizes the literature on trust and presents a new result showing that diversity alone does not lead to more or less trust--but residential segregation in nations depresses trust.

Also available: "Trust, Democracy, and Governance: Can Government Policies Influence Generalized Trust?" in Dietlind Stolle and Marc Hooghe, eds., Generating Social Capital (Palgrave, 2004) in Word.

In July, 2003 I gave a talk, "Generalized Trust and Why It Matters for Business in an Age of Globalization" to the Caux Initiatives for Business Conference for Business and Industry, Globalization: Closing the Gaps.  I argue that trust is a key factor in helping overcome the problems of globalization and in promoting a more globalized world and that it offers great benefits for business in securing a more cooperative and diverse workplace.  Download this non-technical talk prepared for audience from business and non-profit organizations in Word format.  Download the PowerPoint presentation.

 

In Uppsala, Sweden, there is sufficient trust so that many people do not feel the need to to lock their bicycles when they go away:

 

I co-authored a paper with Kerem Ozan Kalkan, a graduate student in Government and Politics, "American Support for Aid to Turkey After World War II," at the Conference on the History of American-Turkish Relations: 1833-1989," sponsored by Bogazici University, Harran University in Urfa, and the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Consulate, Istanbul, Turkey, June 4-10, 2006.  Here we are (Uslaner on right, Kalkan in center) with Walter Douglas of the U.S. Consulate:

 

Social interaction in Jerusalem: Generalized trust or passing in solitude?

"Terrorism and Trust: Sustained Violence and the Social Fabric in Israel" (with Daphna Canetti-Nissim and Ami Pedahzur of the University of Haifa): An examination of how sustained terrorism leads to lower levels of trust in strangers, greater nationalistic patriotism, and to greater support for militant solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  We also show a reciprocal relationship between militancy and trust--higher levels of trust lead to lower levels of militancy.  We examine seven surveys from 2000 to 2003 to make these claims and also show that levels of trust vary over time with the extent of terrorism Israelis face.  Download the paper in Word format.

 

Also see "Trust and Terrorism: Reflections on a Theoretical Framework and Some Empirical Findings," a summary of the "Terrorism and Trust" paper and of related findings on the effects of trust and terrorism in the United States.  This brief summary was prepared for the International Assembly on Managing the Psychology of Terror" sponsored by Issues Deliberation America/Issues Deliberation Australia. Austin, TX, August 19-21, 2004.  Download the summary in PDF format.

 

Making laws where they are least needed: The parliament in Helsinki, Finland, one of the most trusting societies in the world:

And in another high trusting society, the Riksdag in Sweden:

 

Here I am with Bruno von Sydow, the Speaker of the Riksdag:

 

I gave a keynote speech to the International Conference on Social Capital of the Economic and Research Institute of the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, Tokyo, March 25, 2003.  Download the paper I wrote for that conference and the two PowerPoint presentations, "Trust and Economic Growth in the Knowledge Society" and "Trust in the Knowledge Society."

Routine business in Japan depends upon social capital:

And there is no shortage of picnics in the park in Tokyo:

 

Here I am with a geisha at a restaurant in Tokyo; my host is Dr. Takashi Omori of the Economic and Social Research Institute of the Government of Japan:

       

I have also written a short nontechnical paper summarizing my work on trust for a an issue of European Political Science (volume 2, 2003, 43-48), edited by Sigrid Roßteutscher and Spencer Wellhofer.  Download it in WordPerfect or PDF formats.

I currently have a three-year (2001-2004) grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.  The grant is for a project, "Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement."  In this research I seek to explain falling levels of civic engagement in the United States from the 1960s to the present. Fewer Americans are participating in civic life, especially in arenas that demonstrate a strong commitment to one’s community such as giving to charity and volunteering time. I argue that rising levels of economic inequality are a key reason why participation has fallen. But the relationship between inequality and declining participation may not be direct. I offer an alternative explanation: Rising inequality makes people less optimistic for the future, which makes them less trusting of others, and thus less likely to take part in activities that bind them to their communities. I shall test this claim through statistical models and present findings to both the scholarly community and to the larger public.  Download the grant proposal in either pdf format or WordPerfect format.

 

 Not all volunteering, even for good causes, brings people of different backgrounds together to create (or rely upon) generalized trust.  Note the sign at the Manley Beach Life Saving Club in Sydney, Australia.

From the Russell Sage project, M. Michell Brown of the University of Maryland and I have written  "Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,"  American Politics Research, 33 (2005).  We examine why people ‘violate’ rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal, types of participation.  We argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation.  In addition, we posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality.  Using aggregated American state level data for the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we present a series of two-stage least-squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors.  Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust, and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation.  Download the published paper in PDF format.

 

"Where You Stand Depends Upon Where Your Grandparents Sat: The Inheritability of Generalized Trust" examines the roots of generalized trust from the General Social Survey in the United States.  Using a model based upon my earlier work, I find that ethnic heritage (especially for people of Nordic and British background) leads to increased trust, but the share of people of different ethnic groups has considerably less effect on trust.  Thus, your heritage seems to count more than the composition of the ethnic communities where you live.  Download the paper in PDF format.

 

A community event brings people of all backgrounds together: black, white, yellow, red, and, in Okahune township, New Zealand, even orange for the Carrot Carnival every August:

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote a paper summarizing what we know about civic engagement for the Knight Foundation's Civic Engagement Project Co-Directed by The Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland–College Park and the Center for the Study of Voluntary Organizations and Service, Georgetown University.  Download the paper, "Civic Engagement in America: Why People Participate in Political and Social Life" in either WordPerfect or PDF format.

 

"Sex, Lies, and Audiotapes: The Watergate and Monica Lewinsky Scandals in American Politics, In John Garrard and James A. Newell, eds., Scandals in Past and Contemporary Politics (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004, forthcoming) is an examination of the greater partisanship involved in the Clinton impeachment compared to the Nixon impeachment among the public.  Download the paper in Word format.

 

"Civil Society Development on the Black Sea: Social Involvement in the Republic of Moldova and Romania," Interim Report to the International Research and Exchanges Board (with Paul Sum, Gabriel Badescu, Mihai Pisica, and Cosmin Marian) on the results of our surveys of trust and civic engagement in Romania and the Republic of Moldova among both the mass public and organizational activists.  The grant was administered by IREX under the Black and Caspian Sea Collaborative Research Program funded by the Starr Foundation.  Download the report in Word format.

 

"Trust as an Alternative to Risk," presented at the Conference on "Trust and the Management of Technological Risk: Implications for Business and Society," University of Zurich (Switzerland), September 17-20, 2003, and at the Conference on Trust, Department of Philosophy, University of California--Riverside, February 27-28, 2004.  I present an argument that people who trust others underestimate the level of risk in daily life and present evidence, from the Pew Civic Engagement Survey in metropolitan Philadelphia in 1996, where people were asked about the safety of walking in their neighborhoods at night.  Trusters were far more likely to say that their neighborhoods were safe, even controlling for the actual level of violence in their neighborhoods, where they lived, whether they had been the victim of a crime, or their parents had been the victims of crime.  Download the paper in PDF format.  A less technical version is forthcoming in M. Siegrist, H. Gutscher, and T. C. Earle (Eds.), Trust, Technology, and Society: Studies in Cooperative Risk Management (London: Earthscan, 2005

"What is a Good Citizen?  How Romanians Think of Citizenship Obligations," for the Conference on Contemporary Citizenship: The Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion: Is There a Chance for a Post-National Citizenship?, Ljubljana, Slovenia, December 5-6, 2003.  Romanians have stronger expectations that good citizens will obey the law than they will be active in civic life or think of others.  Underlying almost all expectations of good citizenship (using the CID survey of the Romanian public) are views of government performance rather than senses of social values (trust and tolerance) or group ties.  Download in PDF format.

 

"Political Parties and Social Capital, Political Parties or Social Capital," for Richard S. Katz and William F. Crotty, eds., Handbook of Political Parties (Sage, forthcoming, 2004).  Download the paper in PDF format.  I argue that political parties do not (and perhaps ought not) to encourage civic participation in party activities.  Nor do they lead to greater trust in fellow citizens.  Parties are organizations for winning elections and too much participation can make this task difficult.

Two pictures of very dense social capital.  We made 2,505 new friends (2,500 sheep, 2 people, and 3 dogs) outside Wakahapa Village, New Zealand in July, 2003.  They kept us company for almost half an hour.  In the bottom picture, we are in the white car in the center.

"Trust and Social Bonds: Faith in Others and Policy Outcomes Reconsidered," a response to Rodney Hero's article, "Multiple Traditions in American Politics and Racial Policy Inequality," both forthcoming in September, 2004 (v. 57) in Political Research Quarterly.  Hero argues that new data on policy outcomes shows that social capital may often lead to worse outcomes (in economics and education, among others) for minority populations in the American states.  I argue that some of Hero's estimates are misplaced and others show quite strong positive connections of more equal outcomes with trust.  I also show that levels of trust and economic inequality within the African-American community do not shape state-level African-American participation in political and civic life.  However, higher levels of trust among all citizens and lower levels of overall economic inequality are strongly connected to higher rates of African-American participation.  Download the PDF file.

Social connections in Istanbul (right) and Athens (left), where men (but not women) drink coffee and gamble at cafes:

 

 

Men also gather in Greece's National Garden to toss dice (left), but it seems to be a place where social connections may not be connected to trust (right):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Trust and Civil Society in East and West," in Gabriel Badescu and Eric M. Uslaner, eds., Social Capital and the Transition to Democracy (Routledge, 2003).  This paper, available in Word format, applies the model in my The Moral Foundations of Trust to a comparison of Western publics with citizens of the former Communist countries.  The same general model holds in both countries; trust is lower in the former Communist countries because optimism and especially a sense of control is far lower.

Hungarians bowling (but not alone) in a Budapest mall:

Bowling is even bigger in Ljubljana, Slovenia (but never alone):

 

But almost alone: "Bowling Almost Alone: Political Participation in a New Democracy," for the 2004 Joint Sessions of Workshops at the European Consortium for Political Research (download PDF): What underlies conventional and unconventional participation in Romania?  Contrary to much research in the West, conventional and unconventional participation have different roots: People who are satisfied with life and who join civic associations take part in conventional politics, but people who believe that the system is stacked against them engage in protest politics.

Even in the United States, lots of people bowl in groups, especially in highly-educated suburbs with blue politics:

Dietlind Stolle and I examined "The Structure of Trust in Canada" in a paper presented at the Association for Canadian Studies meetings in November, 2003.  We found few connections with civic engagement using the Equality, Security, Community survey in 1999/2000.  We found strong negative effects for in-group ties, for Quebecois--and we also found that people who viewed the courts (and important vehicle for national unity in Canada) are more trusting.  We also found small correlations between perceptions of who would return wallets (a measure of honesty sometimes linked to trust) and generalized trust.  Download the paper in Word format.

"Trust and Consequences": a non-technical summary of my work on trust and civic engagement presented at the Communitarian Summit, February, 1999, Arlington, VA (pdf version, WordPerfect version).  Also available is the more technical version published in Political Science Quarterly, v. 115 (December, 2000), pp. 569-590 under the title "Producing and Consuming Trust" (pdf version, WordPerfect version)

"Social Capital, Television, and the ‘Mean World’: Trust, Optimism, and Civic Participation," Political Psychology, v. 19 (September, 1998), pp. 441-467 (typescript: pdf version, WordPerfect version). This is the paper that exonerates television as a cause of the decline in trust and/or civic engagement in the United States.

"Trust But Verify: Social Capital and Moral Behavior," Social Science Information, v. 38 (March, 1999), pp. 29-56 (typescript, pdf version, WordPerfect version). This paper examines the linkage between trust in other people and commitment to strong standards of moral behavior using data from the World Values Surveys.

"Democracy and Social Capital," in Mark Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 121-150 (typescript, pdf version, WordPerfect version). Early summary of my research on trust and its relationship to democratic government.

(with Richard Conley): "Civic Engagement and Particularized Trust :The Ties that Bind People to Their Ethnic Communities" (originally presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, published in American Politics Research, 31, July, 2003) (pdf version). Ethnic ties may lead people to withdraw from civic engagement in the larger society. Using a Los Angeles Times survey of ethnic Chinese in Southern California, we show that people who restrict their social ties to their own group and who are wary of American culture more generally are less likely to participate in the politics of the larger society.

"Is Washington Really the Problem?" Prepared for presentation at the Hendricks Symposium of Dissatisfaction with American Government, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, October 8-11, 1998 (pdf version, WordPerfect version). This paper argues that people who distrust government don’t like any level of government. Thus proposals to decentralize authority will not restore confidence in government.  This essay was published in John Hibbing and Elizabeth Thiess-Morse, eds., What Is It About Government That Americans Dislike? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 

"Voluntary Organization Membership in Canada and the United States," presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (pdf version, WordPerfect version). I show that Americans and Anglophone Canadians are more likely to trust others than are Quebecois–and that trust matters more for civic engagement in the United States than for either group of Canadians. Canadians, and especially Quebecois, are more likely to put their faith in groups they know rather than individuals they don’t know.

 

Volunteering at the top of North America: The volunteer fire department of Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada:

 "Strong Institutions, Weak Parties: The Paradox of Canadian Political Parties," presented at the 2000 American Political Science Association meetings for a comparative panel on the 50th anniversary of the APSA Committee on Political Parties report, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System" (pdf version, WordPerfect version)

"The Internet and Social Capital," which appeared in the Communications of the ACM (Annals of Computing Machinery), v. 43 (December, 2000), pp. 60-64.  The paper examines the relationship between Internet usage, trust, and social connections (pdf version, WordPerfect version).

"Trust, Civic Engagement, and the Internet," a paper originally prepared for the 2001 European Consortium for Political Research Workshops in Grenoble, France. It will be published in Political Communication, 21 (2004).  The paper extends the earlier analysis of surveys by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and concludes that the Internet does not shape trust, although mistrusters are more likely to hide their true identity on the Internet.  Indeed, visiting chat rooms and making new friends on  line seems associated with using fake identities.  Download the pdf version from the Pew Internet and American Life website or the final version for publication (also in PDF). 

"Trust, Democracy, and Inequality," forthcoming (as translated into Romanian) in Sfera Policii, journal of the Institute for Political and Economic Research, University of Bucharest and based upon a talk to the Romanian Cultural Foundation, January, 2000 (pdf version, WordPerfect version) 

"The Democratic Party and Free Trade: An Old Romance Restored," published in NAFTA: Law and Business Review of the Americas, v. 6 (Summer, 2000), pp. 347-362 and originally presented at the Conference on The United States and the Future of Free Trade in the Americas, John Tower Center for Political Studies, Southern Methodist University, March, 2000.  I argue in this paper that the party that takes a more pro-trade position is more likely to win the Presidency.  Moreover, free trade does not cost Congressional Democrats at election time (pdf version, WordPerfect version).

Also available are my detailed notes for the talk I gave at the University of Maryland's Internet series on "The Internet and Civic Engagement."  Can the Internet build trust, can it destroy trust, or are the reputed effects of the new technology overblown?  Can the Internet build (or destroy) communities?  Download either the pdf version or the WordPerfect version.