Does Diversity Drive Down Trust?

Some researchers claim that diverse populations lead to less trust. Generalized trust is a core value that leads to positive outcomes in societies--from greater tolerance of minority groups and immigrants and willingness to do good deeds, to less corruption, more social welfare and education spending, more open markets, and better functioning government. Generalized trust fundamentally rests upon a foundation of respect for diversity, but at the same time arguing that societies have a common culture. It is the idea that people have a shared fate. Generalized trust rests upon a foundation of economic equality. Yet some claim that diversity leads to less trust rather than more trust. Trusting people who are different from yourself is atypical of most people, they claim. I dispute this--arguing that generalized trust is largely unrelated to population diversity. It is not diversity that matters--it is how populations are distributed. I show that trust is lower not in diverse societies, but rather in societies with large minority groups that are segregated from the majority groups. Minority residential segregation leads to less trust because it leads to less interaction across different groups in society--and leads minorities to associate only with each other, to form their own political organizations, and to see their fate as less dependent upon majority groups. I then discuss how economic inequality and the rule of law shape the relationship between trust and minority residential segregation.Trust, Diversity, Corruption

Public Support for Pro-Choice Abortion Policies in the Nation and States: Changes and Stability After the \u3cem\u3eRoe\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eDoe\u3c/em\u3e Decisions

The Supreme Court, according to the legendary Mr. Dooley, follows the election returns. In 1973, the Court\u27s two landmark decisions, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, struck down statutes in the forty-six states where abortions were not permitted under any circumstances or were allowed only to save the life of the woman during the first three months of pregnancy. There had been a considerable increase in the level of support for the pro-choice position among the public in the few years preceding Roe and Doe. But did the decisions themselves lead to even more public support for that position? What variations do we find among the states and where has the increase in public support for the pro-choice position seemed the most dramatic? Finally, what has been the impact of the abortion controversy on the political process? We shall examine these questions here and suggest some tentative answers. First, we shall consider the available national poll evidence. Second, we shall examine variations in political opinion on abortion policies in the states. Finally, we shall examine the abortion controversy as it has affected legislative decision making and electoral politics. When we consider the variations among the states, we shall present estimates of state public opinion on abortion policy through a computer simulation technique, developed by the second author and refined jointly by us, which permits us to get approximate figures on state opinions from national surveys

Disaster and political trust: The Japan Tsunami and Earthquake of 2011.

We show how disasters influence subjective political trust by testing the effect of the 2011 Great East Japan. For this test, we used the individual level data of 7 Asian covering the period before and after the disaster. The key findings are: the disaster lead to sharp drops in trust of the national government, trust in the Prime Minister, trust in political parties, and trust in the parliament. However, we do not find a loss of support in local governments

Social life and political trust in China: Searching for machers and schmoozers

Previous literature has provided little evidence regarding the ways in which China’s burgeoning social life and rapid urbanization shape Chinese people’s level of trust in their government leaders. This article builds on Robert Putnam’s conceptualization of maching and schmoozing as formal and informal forms of social involvement, respectively. Using the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey, we identify four types of participants in social involvement, namely the inactives, machers, schmoozers and all-rounders, to untangle various aspects of social life in China. Our empirical analysis shows that the sociodemographic positions of the four types of social involvement are largely distinct. Our findings also contribute to the study of political trust by offering insight into the complicated associations between social involvement, hukou status and political trust in contemporary Chinese society

Will We All Hunker Down? The Impact of Immigration and Diversity on Local Communities in Spain

This article engages with the scholarly debate on the supposed negative effect of immigration and diversity, and analyses its effect on two different forms of trust - community trust and generalized trust - in Spain. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, with census section level data of representative samples of all the Spanish municipalities, we test the propositions that relate greater ethnic diversity to social trust. Secondly, we address the limitations intrinsic to the crude measurement of diversity of the Herfindahl index with a systematic consideration of multiple alternative indicators of immigration-related diversity. We find evidence of a negative effect of diversity on community trust but none on generalized trust. Hence, our findings lend some support to the recent scholarship that questions that increasing diversity has a ‘hunkering down’ effect

Discovery of [11C]MK-6884: a positron emission tomography (PET) imaging agent for the study of M4 muscarinic receptor positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) in neurodegenerative diseases

The measurement of receptor occupancy (RO) using positron emission tomography (PET) has been instrumental in guiding discovery and development of CNS directed therapeutics. We and others have investigated muscarinic acetylcholine receptor 4 (M4) positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) for the treatment of symptoms associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. In this article, we describe the synthesis, in vitro, and in vivo characterization of a series of central pyridine-related M4 PAMs that can be conveniently radiolabeled with carbon-11 as PET tracers for the in vivo imaging of an allosteric binding site of the M4 receptor. We first demonstrated its feasibility by mapping the receptor distribution in mouse brain and confirming that a lead molecule 1 binds selectively to the receptor only in the presence of the orthosteric agonist carbachol. Through a competitive binding affinity assay and a number of physiochemical properties filters, several related compounds were identified as candidates for in vivo evaluation. These candidates were then radiolabeled with 11C and studied in vivo in rhesus monkeys. This research eventually led to the discovery of the clinical radiotracer candidate [11C]MK-6884