The Culture of your Homeland or the Context you live in? Examining the Cultural and Institutional Explanation of Generalized Trust using Migration as a Natural Experiment.

In recent years trust has been shown to be an important correlate of a range of positive outcomes at both the individual and society level, which has raised the question about the causes of trust. In the literature on the determinants of trust, a central distinction is between the cultural perspective emphasizing the role of cultural heritage and the institutional perspective focusing on the role institutional context. Empirically, it has, however, been difficult distinguishing between the two perspectives as countries where trusting cultures can be found are also the home of high quality institutions. Using immigrants presently living in a range of European countries, but who were born in another country, I circumvent this problem of indeterminacy of the causes of trust. The analysis builds on self-indicated immigrants in the first three waves of the European Social Survey linking trust of the country origin as well freedom from corruption of the destination country to each respondent. The empirical analysis shows that both trust of the country of origin as well as freedom from corruption in the destination country has a highly significant impact on trust controlling for confounding variables at the individual-level. Including various alternative explanations at the level of the destination country shows that it is difficult separating the effect of incorrupt institutions and wealth, when explaining generalized trust of immigrants. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]