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Trust in democratic societies: A conceptual, methodological, and empirical contribution

  • This thesis is a comprehensive study of trust. The study rests on the argument that all forms of trust stem from the same universal concept. Once trust has been defined at its core, the concept can be specified within a wide variety of contexts, such as trust in your friends and family, in your fellow citizens, or in different kinds of institutions within your country. Although trust is an increasingly popular topic within the social sciences, a lack of consensus on the true meaning of the concept remains. One the one hand, this can be attributed to diverging conceptualisations in a rich and multidisciplinary conceptual literature. On the other, to empirical studies where quantifiable measures do not spring from a clear conceptual account, but rather take survey responses directly at face value. Based on this fundamental issue, the overarching goal of my thesis is to bridge the gap between the conceptual and empirical literature. I achieve this goal with three contributions. Firstly, I conduct a conceptual analysis of trust, which results in a unifying conceptual framework. The framework acknowledges and combines different conceptual understandings from political science, psychology and sociology, thereby representing a move towards clearer consensus on the meaning of trust within the conceptual literature. Secondly, I develop a new measurement model for trust, which is directly rooted in the conceptual framework. The model reflects an alternative approach to empirical research, where quantitative measures of trust are derived from a conceptual argument on the appropriate structure and dimensionality. Thirdly, I identify a typology of citizens who trust in fundamentally different ways. The typology acts as a complementary perspective on the meaning of trust, studied from the viewpoint of citizens in a heterogeneous population. As a whole, I argue that the thesis represents a new approach to trust research, where conceptual and empirical methods are closely intertwined. In order to advance our understanding of this fundamentally important concept, it is crucial to bring the two strands of the literature closer together.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Maria Uttenthal
Advisor:Christine Reh, Catherine de Vries, Mark A. Kayser
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (02/2024)
Publication year:2024
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2023/11/10
Number pages:171
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5215
Release Date:2024/01/15
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2024D002 + 2024D002+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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