Applied Statistics - You, Jong-Sung 

 This week, the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by   You, Jong-Sung , a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.  Jong-Sung’s dissertation on “corruption, inequality, and social trust? explores how corruption and inequality reinforce each other and erode social trust. His dissertation chapter on cross-national study of causal effect of inequality on corruption was published in ASR (February 2005) as an article with S. Khagram. His research interests include comparative politics and political sociology of corruption and anti-corruption reform and political economy of inequality and social policy. Before coming to Harvard, he worked for an NGO in Korea, “Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice?, as Director of Policy Research and General Secretary. He spent more than two years in prison because of democratization movement under military regimes. He has a BA in social welfare from Seoul National University, and a MPA from KSG.  He is also one of the authors of this blog. 

 The talk is entitled “ A Multilevel Analysis of Correlates of Social Trust:  Fairness Matters More Than Similarity ,? and draws on Jong-Sung’s dissertation research.  The abstract follows on the jump: 
 


 I argue that the fairness of a society affects its level of social trust more than does its homogeneity.  Societies with fair procedural rules (democracy), fair administration of rules (freedom from corruption), and fair (relatively equal and unskewed) income distribution produce incentives for trustworthy behavior, develop norms of trustworthiness, and enhance interpersonal trust.  Based on a multi-level analysis using the World Values Surveys data that cover 80 countries, I find that (1) freedom from corruption, income equality, and mature democracy are positively associated with trust, while ethnic diversity loses significance once these factors are accounted for; (2) corruption and inequality have an adverse impact on norms and perceptions of trustworthiness; (3) the negative effect of inequality on trust is due to the skewness of income rather than its simple heterogeneity; and (4) the negative effect of minority status is greater in more unequal and undemocratic countries, consistent with the fairness explanation.