Nordic trust may be younger than it looks.

In the nineteenth century, Scandinavians arriving in the United States had a reputation. They were seen and portrayed as trusting to the point of naivety. The Swedish historian Lars Trägårdh later put the stereotype into the title of an essay on Swedish trust: “the stupid Swede”.

More than a century on, the descendants of those immigrants are, by survey, the most trusting and civic-minded of all Americans, much as the people of their ancestral countries are among the most trusting in the world today.

Is Nordic trust an inheritance from the past, or something each generation’s institutions make anew?

That is the question underneath this chapter, which Peter Thisted Dinesen and I wrote for the Routledge Handbook of Scandinavian Politics. Our task was to take stock:

• how much social capital the Nordic countries have
• how evenly it is spread between and inside them
• how it has changed
• what the competing explanations can and cannot show.

The answers matter well beyond Scandinavia, because the Nordic countries are the model that reformers elsewhere most often reach for.

The Nordic countries are admired for their social harmony. They are perhaps the prime example of what Arend Lijphart called “kinder, gentler” consensus democracies, with high economic and gender equality, very low corruption, generous foreign aid and notable satisfaction with democracy. One of the most striking parts of this gentleness is how citizens treat each other. Most adopt cooperative attitudes towards others, refrain from crime and from small antisocial acts such as littering, uphold norms in public, and organise in voluntary associations to pursue common interests.

We call this social capital, and define it as the strength of the bonds between people who do not know each other. It belongs to a community, but it is built from individuals’ relations, behaviour and attitudes, so it can be measured in individuals and added up. Research usually looks at two parts. The structural part is engagement in associations and voluntary work. The attitudinal part is people’s expectations about whether unknown others will cooperate and can be trusted: social trust.

Its effects are less disputed than its causes. Trust and connectedness make collective action cheaper, because people need to monitor each other less, and they make people more cooperative and altruistic. Studies have linked social capital to lower crime, better health, faster economic growth and less corruption. Its political effects are the most contested. Some studies find that it makes democracy more responsive. Others find that under some conditions it stabilises authoritarian rule, or even contributed to the breakdown of democracy: in Weimar Germany, towns with a denser associational life saw the Nazi party grow faster.

The idea has also entered Nordic politics. Politicians justify policies by how they will maintain or build trust. In Norway alone, between 2000 and 2011, “social capital” appeared in 11 reports by panels appointed by the government and in 8 white papers from the government to parliament.

Cross-national studies have long placed the Nordic countries near the top of the world in social trust. Jan Delhey and Kenneth Newton found them among the most trusting societies in the early to mid-1990s, and called the pattern Nordic exceptionalism. Later studies show it persisting into the twenty-first century. To bring the picture up to date we plotted the 2012 European Social Survey for the five Nordic countries and the seven largest countries in Europe.

The differences between the Nordic countries have received little research. The largest, between Denmark and Sweden, has been examined by Lars Torpe and Henrik Lolle, who find it is accounted for mainly by differences in trust in institutions and in subjective wellbeing. That is a first hint of a theme that runs through the rest of the chapter: trust between people is closely tied to how people experience the institutions around them.

The second component of social capital, participation in civic life, also ranks the Nordic countries high, but less distinctively. Here the pattern in the research is one of Northern Europe in general, and of the United States and Canada, standing out as most civic. Our figure uses the share of people who say they worked in a non-political organisation or association in the last twelve months.

One should not read too much into a single indicator of civic engagement. Volunteering and sociability are measured in other ways, and the organisation of civil society varies so much between countries that it is notoriously hard to compare. What sets Nordic civil society apart may be less its size than its form.

The first distinctive feature is its closeness to the state. Associations, especially in youth work, sports and humanitarian work, are heavily subsidised from taxes. That has probably made organisational life more vibrant. Critics worry that it costs associations their independence, since civil society is supposed to be able to mobilise people against the state when it must.

Studies of Denmark conclude that its associations have kept their independence and can still criticise politicians, including those who fought for their grants, though not every scholar agrees.

The second feature is internal. Nordic civil society has mostly taken the form of membership associations with internal elections and strong local branches. That is a different animal from the hierarchical churches, foundations, charities and ethnic or clan organisations that make up much of civil society in the United States or in developing countries. Nordic associations are, in effect, small democracies.

Countries are averages, and social capital can vary a great deal inside them: Robert Putnam’s study of Italy made regional differences famous, and the American states differ too. Within Denmark, Norway and Sweden, earlier studies found that trust varies between municipalities and neighbourhoods. Much less work had looked at the larger regions within the Nordic countries, the level Putnam studied in Italy, so we mapped them.

Associations vary much more. Using the same measure of organisational work, some regions show about double the involvement of other regions in the same country. Part of that may be measurement, but it also suggests that the organisational side of social capital varies more within countries than trust does.

The overall picture is of two different geographies. Trust varies between neighbourhoods but is strikingly even across the larger regions of each Nordic country. Associational life varies more from region to region. For anyone looking for the roots of Nordic trust in local history or regional culture, that evenness is itself a clue: whatever produces trust seems to operate across the whole of each country.

If the Nordic countries are so alike today, have they always been? The international backdrop is Robert Putnam’s finding that social capital declined in the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century. Tracking trust over time is limited by the data: it can only be measured since survey questions about it were first asked, around 1980. Associations leave longer records, in historical registers and in the history of popular movements.

The organisations born from the five movements were democratic and built on members, with local branches that had a great deal of influence. They founded the distinctive kind of associational life described above, and they remained important in Sweden, Norway and Denmark until at least the 1960s. The peasant movement, strongest in Denmark, also spawned liberal parties and the folk high schools that brought learning and liberal ideas to the countryside. The labour movement organised its own cooperatives, cultural associations and welfare organisations. The religious and temperance movements were strongest in Norway and Sweden, where they built wide-ranging welfare institutions of their own.

Finland only settled into the consensual civic life of its neighbours much later in the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, new kinds of association have grown up everywhere: groups concerned with the environment, animals, human rights and development. Unlike the old movements, most have passive members who pay dues, and they are run by professional secretariats instead of elected local branches.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that the Nordic countries started from relatively high levels of social capital and that the reservoir has grown deeper, especially for trust. Against an international backdrop of stagnation or decline, that is the most striking fact in the chapter.

Why are the Nordic countries so high? The question matters to policymakers as much as to scholars, and the literature divides along the same line as the wider debate about culture and institutions. One side points to recent social and political factors: the quality of institutions, the universal welfare state, values that put self-expression above material security. The other points to deep cultural or structural factors: Protestantism, ethnic homogeneity, early state building, or the relative weakness of feudalism.

The deep-history account has merit, but it is open to confirmation bias. If other societies were also cooperative in the past, then finding cooperation and a vibrant civil society in nineteenth-century Scandinavia proves less than it seems. It also tends to pass over discordant evidence, and it rarely specifies how trust would be handed down from one century to the next.

The institutional accounts are plausible too, and they have a weakness of their own. Because they focus on contemporary causes, they rarely ask the second question: why low corruption, universal welfare states and low inequality arose in the first place, and why they arose first in the Nordic countries. One influential answer is political. Consensual democracies with proportional representation were more likely to produce coalitions of workers and small farmers, the so-called red-green coalitions, that pushed universal welfare states through.

The most interesting possibility is that the two accounts are connected. High trust in the early twentieth century may have made it easier to adopt proportional representation, or to take the first steps towards the welfare state. In Sweden, historians have shown that the early welfare state took over a great deal of work previously done by bourgeois charities and voluntary organisations, which supported this nationalisation of their work and sometimes pushed for it.

In that case one kind of social capital helped build the Swedish welfare state quite concretely. More generally, high trust may have protected universal welfare states against the moral hazard that comes with benefits that are not strictly means-tested, and helped labour movements solve their collective action problems. Historical social capital could then have shaped social policy and inequality, which in turn fed back into trust. The roots and the institutions would not be rival explanations so much as stages of the same process.

Are the Nordic countries exceptional in social capital? If not exceptional, they are at least the highest rankers in Europe, clearly so for trust and less so for associations. They differ considerably among themselves, and internally they vary much more in associational life than in trust. Their associations have a distinctive form: popular movements with democratic internal workings, working with the state. And there are signs both of a high historical stock and of a further increase over the last thirty years. Neither the deep-history nor the institutional account is definitive.

We suggested three ways forward. The first is the Nordic public registries, whose precision allows studies of very local geography and even of genetics and adoption. The second is field experiments, which allow much stronger causal claims about what raises social capital. The third, perhaps the most pertinent to the question of causes, is history: natural experiments that separate deep causes from recent ones. Border changes had already been used to study the effects of nineteenth-century legal codes, of Habsburg bureaucracy and of political instability on trust in Eastern Europe. One of the studies we cited was my own, of Danish rule before 1864.

That study became the second chapter of the dissertation, “Getting to Denmark”. In it I follow the border between Denmark and Germany through two changes of rule and find that the effects of the old state on voting faded within 40 to 70 years, and that today’s trust shows no consistent trace of the old line. If those border regions are a guide, most of the large gap between Danish and German trust opened after 1920. That leans towards the recent-causes side of the debate we lay out in this chapter, while leaving room for history to work through the institutions it helped create.

This matters now because Nordic governments explicitly cite trust and social cohesion when they make policy, and governments elsewhere study the Nordic model hoping to copy it. The most important fact in this chapter for both is the Danish rise. A society that could add 32 points of trust in thirty years, from an already high starting point, is not living off a fixed inheritance. If the institutional accounts are right, trust of that kind is closer to a habit sustained by fair institutions and a civic life that people take part in, and what institutions sustain, they can also let lapse.