Trust and Ethnic Fractionalization: The Importance of Religion as a Cross‐Cutting Dimension

Abstract

Summary The existing literature on diversity and trust has focused on a unidimensional understanding of diversity. We argue that a unidimensional approach is theoretically and empirically problematic and use a recently developed multidimensional measure of social structure to investigate which aspects of diversity are associated with generalized trust. We run cross‐country regressions with up to 115 countries to explore the importance of fractionalization for average trust levels 1981–2008. Using several different measures of ethnic fractionalization, we do not find a general and robust relationship between ethnic fractionalization and trust. In line with expectations, however, we find a negative and significant association between ethnic fractionalization and trust for low levels of ethno‐religious cross‐cuttingness and cross‐fractionalization, illustrating the importance of multidimensionality.