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26 September 2005

A multilevel analysis of the WVS/EVS data

Jong-Sung You

In my draft paper on the "correlates of social trust" (presented at the ASA conference, August 2005), I argued that fairness of a society such as freedom from corruption (fair administration of rules) and distributive fairness (relatively equal and unskewed distributions) affects the society's level of social trust more than its homogeneity does. Based on a multilevel analysis of data from the World Values Surveys (WVS, 1995-97, 2000-01) and the European Values Study (EVS, 1999), I found that corruption and inequality are significantly negatively associated with social trust controlling for individual-level factors and other country-level factors, while ethnic diversity loses significance once corruption or inequality is accounted for. Also, I found that the inequality effect is primarily due to the skewness of income rather than its simple heterogeneity, and that the negative effect of minority status is greater in more unequal and undemocratic societies.

The WVS and the EVS have been conducted in close cooperation with (almost) identical questions. The WVS (1995-97) covers 50 countries, and the WVS/EVS (1999-2001) covers 66 countries in all continents of the world. By pooling the 1995-97 data and the 1999-2001 data, I was able to increase the number of countries to 80. My literature review has unearthed few articles employing multilevel modeling in the comparative politics or sociology literatures. I suspect the scarcity of adequate multilevel data is one reason for this. Schofer and Fourcade-Gourinchas (2001) used the 1991 WVS in a multilevel analysis of the "structural contexts of civic engagement," but the country coverage was just 32. Although they had a lot of observations at the individual level, the relatively small N at the country level prevented them from including many explanatory variables at the country level. Now, with a relatively large number of countries, the WVS/EVS data seems to be an ideal dataset for which many interesting multilevel analyses can be conducted.

Since my draft is rough, I will welcome any comments, either methodological or substantive. You can find a draft here.

Posted by James Greiner at September 26, 2005 7:00 AM

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