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Does Education Produce Tough Lovers? Trust and Bureaucrats

2011; Routledge; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13876988.2011.538543

1572-5448

Søren Serritzlew, Gert Tinggaard Svendsen,

Culture, Economy, and Development Studies

Abstract Trust is an important catalyst for co-operation among bureaucrats. We find it useful to think of the ideal bureaucrat as a “tough lover”. Just as economic man, tough loving bureaucrats are “tough” because they respond to defection with defection. Like political man, the tough lover follows the social norm of meeting others in a “loving” and trusting manner. We discuss how education may increase trust and offer three hypotheses on how education is linked to trust, and how this relationship depends on the level of corruption in a country. We investigate these relationships in a database covering 21 countries and conclude that education does have positive effects on social trust and institutional trust in non-corrupt countries. In corrupt countries, education has the opposite effect on institutional trust. I do not think that the doctrine of self-interest as preached in America [“self-interest rightly understood”]… contain[s] many truths so clear that for men to see them it is enough to educate them. Hence it is all-important for them to be educated, for the age of blind sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already long past, and I see a time approaching in which freedom, public peace, and social stability will not be able to last without education. (Alexis de Tocqueville 1969 Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1969. Democracy in America, New York: Anchor Books. [Google Scholar]: 528)