Measuring social trust and trusting the measure

Decades of rigorous quantitative scholarship have generated a wealth of knowledge regarding the causes and consequences of crossnational variations in social trust. However, while some social science disciplines have made significant contributions to this conversation, others have largely failed to do so. The field of international relations, for example, has lagged behind in producing aggregate-level scholarship on social trust. This is surprising given that (1) trust influences public opinion and thereby the incentive structure for political leaders and (2) many peacebuilding efforts directly target the levels of trust in post-conflict settings. Country-level trust scholarship in international relations and the social sciences more generally is hampered by data scarcity. The main purpose of this article is to present a new publicly available data set on aggregate levels of social trust. Relying on a set of 19 widely accepted correlates, we construct a new cross-sectional measure of the concept that covers all countries from 1946 to 2010. We then perform a series of empirical tests establishing the validity of our measure. Finally, we offer a number of bivariate analyses to demonstrate the broad utility of our new variable for scholars in the social sciences.