Political and Social Trust in Sweden. : A quantitative study of how political trustrelates to social trust in Sweden.

Abstract: Social trust is one of the building stones for democratic societies. It builds on mutual understanding of the collective commonly shared norms. However, how it associates to political trust on the individual level is still ambiguous, as such this paper hopes expand the knowledge of how it is related to political trust in Sweden on an individual level.  Aim: This paper aims to explore how political trust in Sweden relates to social trust. Furthermore, it aims to study how the relationship varies by educational attainment. Data and methods: This study has used ordinary least square (OLS) to estimate to what degree political trust associated with social trust. It has also in the regression analysis included an interaction term to see how political trust interacts with educational attainment. Results: It is hypothesized that higher levels of political trust are associated with higher levels of social trust. The result from this study finds significant results that higher levels of political trust are associated with higher levels of social trust. Indicating to a positive correlation. It is also hypothesized that higher educated would express stronger effect of political trust on social trust. The estimations showed no significant interaction term. The relationship between political trust and social trust does not vary by educational attainment. Discussion: This paper found that the first hypothesis was in line with the findings of previous research and theory. As such, it was confirmed. The second hypothesis was not in line with previous findings or theory and suggested that there is no interaction effect, at least not for Sweden. The differences in methods and how the contextual and institutional differences are handled in this study compared to previous studies are discussed and highlighted. These discussions are then culminated into a proposal for future research.