Two Papers on Social and Political Trust


DATE
Monday March 13, 2023
TIME
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

UBC Political Science Professor Emeritus Richard Johnston hosts a discussion of Two Papers on Social and Political Trust:

Authors: Allison Harell (Université du Québec à Montréal), Keith Banting (Queen’s University), Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University)

Abstract: Several previous studies of public opinion have shown that immigrants are seen as less deserving of welfare benefits than native-born citizens. However, there is no consensus on the explanation for this finding, or on how to build greater public support for more inclusive redistribution. In a previous paper drawing on Canadian data, we argued that support for redistribution to immigrants and racialized minorities is powerfully tied to perceptions of their “membership commitment”: that is, whether they are seen as committed to the larger society and willing to make sacrifices for it (Harell et al. 2021). In this paper, we attempt to test this hypothesis in the comparative setting using an original seven country survey conducted in 2021-2022 (n=12,000) to 1) explore perceptions of the levels of commitment of immigrants to the host society in Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Italy, Sweden, and the US; and 2) test the effect of these perceptions of membership commitment on public support for general and inclusive redistribution, understood as the inclusion of immigrants in the benefits of major social programs on the same terms and conditions as the native-born. In doing so, we provide a comparative test of recent findings in Canada of the powerful relationship between perceptions of shared membership and support for redistribution. Our study offers the first systematic test of the extent to which immigrants suffer a “membership penalty” within host societies, and how these membership penalties vary across different Western countries with different citizenship and welfare regimes. We conclude with a broader discussion of the barriers that immigrants and other marginalized groups face in being perceived as equally committed as native-born citizens, and how these barriers might be addressed.

 

Authors: Henry E. Brady (Berkeley) and Thomas Kent

Abstract: Except for the military and science, confidence in most American political and nonpolitical institutions has fallen precipitously over the past fifty years. Declines in trust are partly the result of dissatisfaction with governmental and institutional accountability and concomitant skepticism about the competency and responsiveness of institutions. Declines are also the result of polarization in trust in institutions, as Republicans trust business, the police, religion, and the military much more than Democrats, whose confidence in these institutions, except the military, has fallen. In turn, Democrats trust labor, the press, science, higher education, and public schools much more than Republicans, whose confidence in these institutions has fallen. Declines and polarization in confidence may be traceable to political polarization stemming from increasing income inequality and segregation in America. With polarization and decreasing trust in institutions, it becomes more difficult to fight epidemics, maintain faith in policing, and deal with problems such as climate change.

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Bios

Keith Banting began his teaching career at UBC before moving to Queen’s University, where he is now the Stauffer-Dunning Fellow in the School of Policy Studies and professor emeritus in the Department of Political Studies. His research focuses on the politics of social policy and the politics of multiculturalism. In the field of social policy, his contributions include Inequality and the Fading of Redistributive Politics (UBC Press). In the field of multiculturalism, early contributions include Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada (IRPP) and Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies (OUP). More recently, he is co-editor with Will Kymlicka of The Strains of Commitment: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies (OUP). Professor Banting is a member of the Order of Canada and the Royal Society of Canada.

Henry Brady is the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley from 2009-2021. He received his PhD in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. He has written on electoral politics and political participation, social welfare policy, political polling, political polarization and trust, and statistical methodology. He is past president of the American Political Science Association. Among his books are Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) which won the Harold Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995), and The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (2012). His most recent book is Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the New Gilded Age (2018). Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics.