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Changes in Social Trust: Evidence from East German Migrants

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Abstract

Using three waves of the Germany's individual-level panel data, this paper analyses whether there are any changes in the trust levels of East German migrants who move to the former Western German regions after the reunification. The results demonstrate that the duration of living in the West is positively associated with East German migrants’ trust and that the labour market is the possible channel through which social trust is fostered. This finding suggests that trust is moulded through contemporaneous shocks or experiences.

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Notes

  1. Changes in trust after migration to the West can be explained mainly by two reasons. First is the effect of Western transformations (e.g. democracy, capitalism). The second one is the effect of exposure to the high trust environment, which is the focus of this paper. The first reason is not unique to the East German migrants; it can also be applied to the changes in trust of East Germans in the East. Unfortunately, the two effects could not be distinguished but the estimates provided by the empirical analysis can thus be regarded as an upper bound of the true effect.

  2. The sample restriction is to ensure the homogeneity of the sample characteristics although the difference in trust between the two groups is not statistically significant (Table 7).

  3. The widely used measure of trust, based on the responses to the question, “Would you say that most people can be trusted? Or do you think you need to be very careful in dealing with others?” is by no means without criticisms. Some scholars propose an alternative measure via experiments. For example, Glaeser et al. (2000) compare trust measures of survey and experiments and find that the survey-based trust is closer to trustworthiness rather than trust. Nannestad (2008) and Ermisch et al. (2009) also find discrepancies between survey-based trust and experiment-based trust. A more recent and comprehensive study conducted across six countries find that the survey-based trust is highly correlated with the experimental measure of trustworthiness in others (Murtin et al. 2018). The measure used in this study is an improved version of the original survey-based measure, and is found to be highly correlated with the experimental trust (Naef and Schupp 2009). Therefore, while acknowledging its limitations, we think that our measure of trust is robust in terms of its economic significance as found in related literature. In this paper, the original 4-scale dependent variable was collapsed into a binary variable for the sake of interpretation. Both variables yield similar results and same implications.

  4. The education variables are coded as 1) Lower than completion of 10th year, 2) completion of 10th year, 3) qualified for university (Arbitur) and higher. The marital status dummies are 1) married, 2) single, and 3) divorced (including the widowed and separated). The job dummies are 1) labour force non-participants (the majority of whom are retirees) except for students, 2) students, 3) the unemployed, 4) blue-collar (low-skilled) workers (including people in training), 5) white-collar (high-skilled) workers and civil servants, 6) the self-employed and freelancers.

  5. Specifically, the instrument is calculated using the formula, \({Z}_{i}=\mathrm{log}Wag{e}_{t-1}-logWag{e}_{91}\).

  6. If we observe the gap of trust between stayers and migrants by survey year, we can see that the gap closes down in 2013 (Table 8). Judging from the fact that the migrants moved to the West before the early 2000′s, we can infer that trust accumulates in the initial stage of migration and the growth rate decelerates after a certain period.

  7. The author confirmed that the results are robust to the use of the probit and the ordered probit models.

  8. To check the validity of the instrument, the author underwent a reduced form analysis. The instrumental variable did not have a statistically significant association with trust.

  9. This can be also supported by the lack of growth for East German migrants in the year 2013 as shown in Table 8. By this time, most of migrants had already spent more than ten years in the West. As migrants migrated with the purpose of being employed in the West, it is likely that their trust grew as they succeeded in getting employed. It is possible that as migrants moved to the West with the purpose of getting a job, trust increases as they succeed in the labour market, which happens in the early stage after relocation—the mean year of unemployment for the East German migrants is 1.09 years.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges financial support from the BK21Plus Program (Future-oriented innovative brain raising type, 21B20130000013) which is funded by the Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation of Korea.

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  1. Department of Economics, The University of Suwon, 17 Wauan-gil Bongdam-eup Hwaseong-si Gyeonggi-do, Hwaseong, 18323, Korea

    Seong Hee Kim

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Appendices

Appendix

Table 6 Descriptive statistics of West Germans and East Germans
Full size table
Table 7 Comparison between one-time migrants and return migrants
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Table 8 Difference between stayers and migrants by survey year
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Table 9 First-stage results using the two-stage least squares estimator
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Explanations on the Migration-Related Variables

Construction of migration-related variables involved the following code work. First, Berlin was regarded as the former East German region for convenience as geographically West Berlin was surrounded by East German territories and relatively few individuals were identified to reside in West Berlin in the SOEP. Second, the analysis was based on the respondents who indicated that they were born in Germany or immigrated before 1960 when the Berlin Wall was built. Identifying whether a respondent was from East or West Germany was done through a variable, loc1989, that revealed the location of the respondent in 1989, the year immediately before reunification. East Germans were defined as the respondents who indicated that they were in East Germany in 1989, West Germans as those who answered that they were in West Germany in 1989, and other respondents were dropped. Finally, there was a small number of observations of return-migration, that is, East Germans returning back to home-state or other former East German states after spending some time in the former West German states. These cases were dropped and analyses were conducted based on the respondents who migrated to West Germany and stayed in the West until their final observation.

Not all respondents were first observed in the East. For the individuals first observed in the West, it was impossible to identify whether it is their initial or repeated migration to the West Germany, still less their time of migration. It was assumed that it was their initial migration to West Germany for East German respondents that were first surveyed in the West. For these individuals, constructing the variable on years lived in the West involved some “guesstimation.” I assumed that they had moved to the West a year before either their year of moving into the current dwelling (hgmoveyr) or the year they had been first contacted for the survey (eintritt), whichever was the earliest.

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Kim, S.H. Changes in Social Trust: Evidence from East German Migrants. Soc Indic Res 155, 959–981 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02611-z

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