Do jihadist terrorist attacks cause changes in institutional trust? A multi‐site natural experiment

Research from the United States suggests that the 9/11 terrorist attack increased trust in political institutions by creating a “rally effect.” In this research note we analyze Eurobarometer data collected immediately before and after the March 11, 2004 terrorist attack in Madrid to replicate and extend previous findings from the United States. We report that, first, trust in different types of institutions (political, media, justice) increased significantly immediately after the Madrid terrorist attack; second, the effect of the attack varied systematically across different types of institutions; and, third, the effect was generally short‐lived. Our results suggest that the rally effect of terror on trust in institutions generalizes across national contexts but also that the effect differs across types of institutions.

The title of this part of the book—“Discovering Natural Experiments”—suggests a first foundational issue for discussion. The random or as-if random assignment that characterizes natural experiments occurs as a feature of social and political processes—not in connection with a manipulation planned and carried out by an experimental researcher. This is what makes natural experiments observational studies, not true experiments. For this reason, however, researchers face a major challenge in identifying situations in which natural experiments occur. Scholars often speak not of “creating” a natural experiment, but of “exploiting” or “leveraging” an opportunity for this kind of approach in the analysis of observational data. In an important sense, natural experiments are not so much designed as discovered. How, then, does one uncover a natural experiment? As the survey in Part I of the book will suggest, new ideas for sources of natural experiments—such as close elections or weather shocks—seem to arise in unpredictable ways. Moreover, their successful use in one context does not guarantee their applicability to other substantive problems. The discovery of natural experiments is thus as much art as science: there appears to be no algorithm for the generation of convincing natural experiments, and analysts are challenged to think carefully about whether sources of natural experiments discovered in one context are applicable to other settings. Yet, the best way to recognize the potential for using a natural experiment productively is often through exposure to examples. This can generate ideas for new research, as existing approaches are modified to suit novel contexts and questions, and it can also lead researchers to recognize new sources of natural experiments. Part I of the book therefore surveys and discusses in detail existing research, as a way to broach the central topic of how to discover natural experiments.

Adolescence is a crucial formative period for developing persistent (dis)trust in political institutions, with long-term implications for democracy. This cross-national mixed-methods study investigates whether adolescents exhibit higher governmental trust than adults and which (un)trustworthiness criteria shaped their views during COVID-19. Quantitative data from multiple European countries (N = 3,714) show that younger adolescents reported significantly higher governmental trust than older adolescents and adults in all examined countries, with the largest difference observed in Serbia. A complementary qualitative meta-synthesis of seven primary studies (N = 251) uncovered 12 broad (un)trustworthiness criteria in COVID-19 decision-making, mostly centred on decision-making procedures. Key concerns included unpredictability, unexplained measures, and a lack of reciprocity and mutual responsibility between citizens and authorities. Younger adolescents sought closeness, emotional support, and predictability, while older adolescents and adults prioritised mutual responsibility, shared values, and clear explanations. These perspectives suggest that younger adolescents' institutional trust may diminish depending on the degree of (un)trustworthy decision-making, especially as their cognitive abilities, autonomy, societal roles, and political awareness evolve. Demonstrating or involving adolescents in trustworthy decision-making is crucial for establishing lasting institutional (dis)trust. The findings of this chapter can inform future crisis management strategies and bolster trust in democratic institutions among emerging generations.

A key policy concern in recent years has been the decline in levels of trust by citizen in public institutions. Trust is one of the foundations upon which the legitimacy and sustainability of political systems are built. It is crucial to the implementation of a wide range of policies and influences people’s behavioural responses to such policies. However, despite its acknowledged importance, trust in public institutions is poorly understood and is not consistently measured across OECD countries. The OECD Trust Database brings together information from a wide range of different household surveys containing measures of trust and combines this with information on other social and economic outcomes. The size of the database and range of covariates make it possible to identify the underlying patterns captured by survey based measures of trust in institutions and systematically test the accuracy (i.e. reliability and validity) of these measures. Reliability is tested by examining the consistency of measures of institutional trust across different surveys and between different waves of the same survey. Validity is harder to test than reliability. It is however possible to examine the construct validity of institutional trust measures by looking at whether these measures show the expected correlation with other social and economic variables on a cross-country basis. Analysis of item-specific non-response rates provides important additional information on the face validity of institutional trust measures.

The overall focus of this paper is on developing a framework to explain support for alternative politics of a populist type. It has often been argued that the increasing focus on scandals and corruption has done much to alienate voters from traditional politics and that this alienation has, in turn, been reflected in what might be termed a ‘soap‐operatisation’ of politics, with an attendant diminution of trust in political institutions. We contend that, while reducing political events to variants of soap‐operas (with the demystification and banalisation of politics to which this gives rise) has had profound effects on the public perception of the political and political institutions, the result may not be simply a lack of, or diminution of, trust in politicians and political institutions, but rather a parallel growth in cynicism. The paper argues that while cynicism is often assumed to be a component of the decline in trust in institutions the two are, in fact, different and can give rise to different manifestations. We address the difference between the two concepts and develop a hypothesis that contends that supporters of populist alternatives can be located within two attitudinal clusters. We argue that, with respect to populist politicians and populist political parties, a cynical view of politics and political institutions will tend to produce individuals who support what we term ‘political entrepreneurs’, while a real distrust in institutions will translate into support for a more traditional populism of the radical right.

Do Longer School Days Have Enduring Educational, Occupational, or Income Effects? A Natural Experiment in Buenos Aires, Argentina Juan Llach (bio), Cecilia Adrogué (bio), and María Gigaglia (bio) In 1971 longer school days were decreed for around half of the primary schools in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The policy covered all the city neighborhoods, and the schools were chosen probably at random. An unusual opportunity for a natural experiment was thus created. In 2006 and 2007 we interviewed a sample of 380 alumni of the 1971 cohort, thirty years after their 1977 graduation from schools with and without longer days. We tried to identify how the length of their school days affected their education, occupation, and income. The next section provides a fuller description of the aforementioned policy. The subsequent section, devoted to a review of the literature, is longer than usual. We thought it was important to review and to compare both the older literature on the relationship between the length of school schedules and academic results and the newer literature devoted to renewing the educational production function approach using random or natural experiments. Cross-references between different literatures are rare, but from our point of view, they can promote a better understanding of the issues dealt with here. [End Page 1] The third section presents the methodology and the characteristics of the database, and the fourth section shows the main results of the experiment. We then conclude with a discussion of the results and some of their policy implications. The Policy and Its Context In this section we describe the policy that gave origin to the natural experiment and the context in which it took place. Educational System in Argentina and Buenos Aires in the 1970s Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Argentine educational system has been governed by the principles of free and universal access, included laity in the public schools, and, up to the late 1970s, provided for seven years of compulsory primary education.1 Although primary education was constitutionally in the hands of the provinces, the federal government continued running some primary schools in most provinces until the late 1970s and early 1980s. The private sector—both religious and secular—was also authorized to run primary and secondary schools. The case of the city of Buenos Aires was peculiar. As the capital of Argentina, until 1996 its administration was in the hands of the federal government, and the same happened with its schools. Enrollment rates in Argentina have been traditionally high when compared to other Latin American countries. In 1970 school expectancy from primary to tertiary education was 10.3 years at the federal level, and even higher and close to the average of developed countries (11.5 years) in the city of Buenos Aires (Llach 2005). Policy of Lengthening School Days in the City of Buenos Aires: Creation of a Natural Experiment The policy introduced a double shift (DS), or full-time attendance, into the primary schools of the city of Buenos Aires.2 This approach began as a pilot [End Page 2] experiment in 1957 proposed by the professor Carlos Florit, general inspector of schools of the National Council of Education (Consejo Nacional de Educación).3 During the 1960s, the number of DS schools increased very gradually, but in 1971 it was drastically expanded to encompass almost 50 percent of the primary schools of the city of Buenos Aires.4 The policy was originally conceived to achieve both educational and social purposes (Consejo Nacional de Educación 1968, 1971) and was evenly applied in all the school districts in such a way that, in the early 1970s, the proportion of DS primary schools in every school district was around 50 percent of the total. Admission Criteria and the Selection Bias Issue. Even in areas where the middle class predominates in the city, there were, and still are, important socioeconomic differences among the neighborhoods and school districts. From a social perspective, the idea of the new policy was to provide a solution to the uneven consequences of the increasing participation of women in the labor force. While richer households could pay for nurses or other domestic help to...

While previous research has focused on terrorist attacks and natives’ attitudes towards immigration, we examine the effect of anti-refugee attacks on refugees’ attitude towards the host country. We use survey data from the 33rd wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel as the fieldwork period overlapped with the infamous anti-refugee riots in Bautzen and as the survey includes a refugee sample. Making use of this natural experiment, we find significant and negative short-term effects of the riots on respondents’ perception of Germany, as well as low geographic variation. Such natural experiments in the form of unexpected events during survey design offer social scientists the possibilities to identify causal effects from observational survey data as they split respondents into a control and treatment group. Given the vast amount of (cross-)national survey data, often including specific subsamples, our study demonstrates the great potential of natural experiments for sociological research on minority groups in society.

Despite the importance of human behavior in containing a disease outbreak, formal quantitative analyses examining the relationship between measures of trust and COVID-19 outcomes remain limited. We use data from Wave 7 (2017-2022) of the World Values Survey to assess the country-level relationship between trust and COVID-19 outcomes across 61 countries via clustering and regression. After adjusting for country-level confounders, our findings indicate that countries with low trust have significantly greater numbers of COVID-19 deaths (1200.6 more COVID-19 deaths per million, 95% CI [510.92, 1890.3]), significantly greater excess death (2289.1 more excess deaths per million, 95% CI [971.1, 3607.2]), and a lower vaccination rate (16.6 fewer people vaccinated per 100, 95% CI [-27.7, -5.6]) than high trust countries, suggesting a tangible impact of trust on country-level COVID-19 outcomes. We discuss differences between interpersonal and institutional trust and advocate for incorporating trust in disease modeling to better predict country-level outcomes.

Research to inform organizational strategy decisions studies the impact of specific managerial decisions on performance. While links from decisions to outcomes can be convincingly identified in individual, specific circumstances, trying to do the same with a larger set of decisions and outcomes can be problematic. In a situation with a substantive sample, relying on standard metrics such as financial statements, the link to particular outcomes can be difficult to establish. Especially when trying to choose metrics not already correlated in some way. Our research is generally in the field of knowledge management (KM). The discipline has an extensive history of attempts to link better management of knowledge and other intangibles to performance outcomes. While the performance outcomes are fairly straightforward (financial success such as profitability or return on investment, innovation success, etc.), the metric for knowledge management is harder to pin down. The literature shows dozens of approaches. Some are for single firms or a small sample, but even if focusing only on metrics for a larger sample of firms, disagreement exists. But even when a KM metric is chosen for a larger sample, there is often a direct tie between input and output measures, making correlation difficult to establish, let alone causation. If profitability is part of both the input and output measures, of course they are correlated. The most advanced statistical techniques don’t establish anything more than what the researcher should already know from a cursory look at the logic of the study and the specifics of the variables. As a result, whether KM actually results in better organizational performance is still an open and much debated question in the field. One research approach that can get around this issue is the natural experiment. Pioneered by Nobel winner David Card and others, the natural experiment uses two measurements with a clear, consequential event separating the two—minimizing the impact of samples that might otherwise be connected contemporaneously. The event, such as a change in law, provides a change in circumstances delinking the measures. Whether structured as a pre/post experiment (measuring before or after the intervening event) or control/experimental group experiment (one group exposed to the event, the other not), the outcome can provide convincing results and can even suggest causation. This paper will cover our work with natural experiments in relation to KM and performance outcomes for merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. Can KM metrics before an M&A event predict the success of the event? Success can be defined by the change in financial performance after the event takes place.

In a preregistered research, we examined the relationships between conspiracy mentality (i.e., the individual susceptibility to endorse conspiracy theories, Bruder et al., 2013) and trust in three actors of the COVID-19 crisis: 1) Political institutions, 2) scientific and medical institutions, and 3) the medical personnel. While the two former groups have played a direct or indirect role in decisions related to public health measures, the latter has not. We expected all these relationships to be negative and mediated by the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities to pursue secret agendas. In a study conducted with Belgian (N = 1136) and French (N = 374) convenience samples, conspiracy mentality negatively predicted trust in political institutions, and trust in scientific and medical institutions. These relations were partly mediated by belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities. In addition, distrust in political, medical and scientific institutions were highly and positively correlated, suggesting that these groups may be viewed as part of a same supra-ordinate category – the “Elites”. By contrast, we found a small negative relationship between conspiracy mentality and trust in the medical personnel in the Belgian sample, but not in the French sample. Trust in the medical personnel was unrelated to the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized, and only weakly related to distrust in political institutions. This suggests that individuals with a susceptibility to believe in conspiracy theories may not have a propensity to distrust all actors involved in the management of the pandemic, but only those directly or indirectly tied to decisions pertaining to public health measures.

This article examines patterns of popular trust in political and public institutions in Nepal. We ask to what extent such trust is linked, on one hand, to citizens’ social and political identities, and on the other hand, to citizens’ perceptions of institutional performance. Our findings demonstrate that trust in public institutions varies extensively. Trust is high for a number of professional institutions, such as schools and hospitals. It is also quite high for local government institutions. Trust in the parliament and the government is much lower. Furthermore, the analysis reveals a weak relationship between institutional trust and identity variables. Demographic and social characteristics of participants, such as caste, and religious and political affiliations, have little significance in explaining the level of citizens’ trust in political and public institutions. Such trust primarily depends upon how citizens assess the performance of these institutions. Hence, patterns of institutional trust depend on how participants evaluate the current macro-political situation in Nepal, whether recent political changes are judged to have gone in the right direction. In a more general and comparative perspective our findings from Nepal fit with a performance-based theory of institutional trust, while, to a large extent, they disconfirm identity-based explanations.

IntroductionImproving infrastructure to support walking and cycling is often regarded as fundamental to encouraging their widespread uptake. However, there is little evidence that specific provision of this kind has led...

Summary 1. Despite recent interest in linkages between above‐ and below‐ground communities and their consequences for ecosystem processes, much remains unknown about their responses to long‐term ecosystem change. We synthesize multiple lines of evidence from a long‐term ‘natural experiment’ to illustrate how ecosystem retrogression (the decline in ecosystem process rates due to long‐term absence of major disturbance) drives vegetation change, and thus above‐ground and below‐ground carbon (C) sequestration, and communities of consumer biota. 2. Our study system involves 30 islands in Swedish boreal forest that form a 5000‐year, fire‐driven retrogressive chronosequence. Here, retrogression leads to lower plant productivity and slower decomposition and a community shift from plants with traits associated with resource acquisition to those linked with resource conservation. 3. We present consistent evidence that above‐ground ecosystem C sequestration declines, while below‐ground and total C storage increases linearly for at least 5000 years following fire absence. This increase is driven primarily by changes in vegetation characteristics, impairment of decomposer organisms and absence of humus combustion. 4. Data from contrasting trophic groups show that during retrogression, biomass or abundance of plants and decomposer biota decreases, while that of above‐ground invertebrates and birds increases, due to different organisms accessing resources via distinct energy channels. Meanwhile, diversity measures of vascular plants and above‐ground (but not below‐ground) consumers respond positively to retrogression. 5. We show that taxonomic richness of plants and above‐ground consumers are positively correlated with total ecosystem C storage, suggesting that conserving old‐growth forests simultaneously maximizes biodiversity and C sequestration. However, we find little observational or experimental evidence that plant diversity is a major driver of ecosystem C storage on the islands relative to other biotic and abiotic factors. 6. Synthesis. Our study reveals that across contrasting islands differing in exposure to a key extrinsic driver (historical disturbance regime and resulting retrogression), there are coordinated responses of soil fertility, vegetation, consumer communities and ecosystem C sequestration, which all feed back to one another. It also highlights the value of well‐replicated natural experiments for tackling questions about above‐ground–below‐ground linkages over temporal and spatial scales that are otherwise unachievable.

The effect of environmental policy on water resources is often challenging to evaluate due to dynamic interactions between people and water, particularly in data‐scarce watersheds. Increasing interactions between society and hydrology present a need to understand causal relations for improved assessment and prediction in complex human‐water systems. Conventional approaches to causal assessment in hydrology are sometimes insufficient due to data scarcity or system complexity. We argue that natural experiments present a promising and complementary avenue for assessing causal relations in such systems. In this spirit, we describe a natural experiment to assess causal effects of the Ganges water treaty, between India and Bangladesh, on streamflow and channel salinity in the Ganges delta in Bangladesh. We apply causal inference to assess the effect of the treaty on streamflow and use the results to generate synthetic ensembles of streamflow and salinity under a realistic scenario (with the treaty) and a counterfactual scenario (without the treaty). We then use synthetic streamflow ensembles to model salinity ensembles. The Ganges water treaty increased dry‐season streamflow in Bangladesh by approximately 18% and decreased channel salinity by approximately 10%. The treaty has the greatest effect on salinity in Bangladesh in the driest years, but the overall effect is small compared with natural variability. We show that our approach accounts for natural hydrologic variability to accurately assess the causal effect of the treaty, compared with a naive approach that greatly overestimates the effect. This research demonstrates the value of natural experiments for causal assessment in coupled human‐water systems.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, people began to use the Internet more actively. Accordingly, the question arises of how the accelerated digitalization, which became one of the results of the pandemic, has affected various aspects of our lives, including our attitude to the political power institutions. This article discusses the relation of Internet usage activity and the trust toward the political institutions in European countries. There are contradicting data in the literature regarding the relationship between institutional trust and the activity of using the Internet. We assumed that the direction of relationship is associated with the efficiency of the state power institutions. Based on the government effectiveness index, we have chosen five European countries with the highest government efficiency and five countries with the lowest. To assess the activity of using the Internet, we used data from the European Social Survey (ESS) that show the average frequency of Internet use during the month and the average duration of its use during the day. The dependent variables were respondents' assessments of their own trust in the different political institutions. Next, using multiple regression analysis, we assessed the relationship between two indicators of Internet use activity and trust in each of the institutions. The results of the regression analysis demonstrated that in the countries with low government efficiency, the activity of Internet usage is negatively associated with trust in various political institutions. In countries with high government efficiency, we found a positive relationship between Internet usage activity and institutional trust.