Although it has been demonstrated that fear is related to various types of trust, less is known about the generalizability of relationships across contexts. Crime is a universal social and political problem that imposes harm on both individuals and the social order; as such, it can affect attitudes in a similar way across different contexts. Since the way in which people base their trust is relational, I argue that we need to treat social, political, and order-institutional types of trust separately in relation to fear of crime. Using data from 23 European countries, I test my claims about the strength and impact of the three relationships. My results reveal a clear and consistent negative relationship between fear of crime and levels of social trust, but not between fear of crime and levels of political or order-institutional trust. This relationship holds in cross-national comparisons for social trust, whereas associations with political and order-institutional trust vary across countries. These findings underscore the need for trust research to distinguish between different forms of trust when assessing how fear shapes the social and institutional foundations of democratic societies.
In this paper we study how market institutions affect trust in people we don't know. We show evidence that trust increases with deeper market depth in countries with strong protection of contracts. However, the trust and market-depth institutions relation is negative in countries where enforcement of contracts is poor. Our results contribute to the literature in providing evidence of heterogeneous effects regarding the relation between trust and market-depth institutions. Therefore, deepening market-depth institutions may either reinforce or weaken trust on strangers, and, at the end, this relation depends on how much institutions ensure enforcement of agreements among strangers.
In the last decade, trust-based governance approaches have gained prominence in public administration as a means of enhancing motivation, cooperation and effectiveness. However, the development of trust across different layers in multi-level organisations is particularly complex. Top-level leadership must be willing to make itself vulnerable despite being unable to interact directly with the entire organisation to assess staff trustworthiness. Moreover, while intra-organisational trust may emerge from the interplay between institutional and interactional trust, it remains unclear how this interplay can be effectively orchestrated across organisational levels. This observation begs the question: How can top-level leadership build intra-organisational trust across hierarchical levels? This article explores an empirical case in which top-level leadership successfully advanced intra-organisational trust across municipal levels. Based on analysis of the interplay among different forms of trust, the study identifies three central factors that explain how top-level leadership successfully developed trust. These include an initial act of trust by top-level leaders, a mutually reinforcing interplay between institutional and interactional trust, and the establishment of dialogue-supporting structures that enabled interactional trust to emerge. The article offers recommendations for practitioners and underscores the need for further research in trust development across multiple levels.
