1. Political and Interpersonal Trust Among Peasants: a Reevaluation.
- Author
-
Seligson, Mitchell A. and Sahizar X., José Manuel
- Subjects
INTERPERSONAL relations ,PEASANTS ,CITY dwellers ,LITERATURE ,CONFIDENCE ,LAND reform - Abstract
This paper challenges the widely accepted notions that peasants are more distrustful than urbanites by suggesting that the literature has been flawed by a lack of rural-urban comparisons, by the failure to utilize reliable measures of trust and to distinguish between political and interpersonal trust, and by the lack of convincing empirical evidence for the existence of distrust among peasants. The paper employs two samples. (N rural = 531, N urban = 202) from Costa Rica and finds higher levels of interpersonal trust in the peasant sample and lower levels of interpersonal trust among urbanites. In contrast, political trust is found to be higher in the city. Environmental factors are proposed as the explanations for these findings, and data from a sample of land reform beneficiaries (N = 753) are used as evidence of the importance of environment in explaining trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 1979