Scarred for Life? A Longitudinal Perspective on Unemployment and Social Trust
Social trust, the belief that most other people can be trusted, is an important moral resource that promotes health, longevity, better working democracies, and economic development. Recent longitudinal research from the United Kingdom and the United States shows that job loss leads, even after re-employment, to a lasting decrease in people’s social trust. Very little is known, however, about the mechanisms that account for this ‘scarring effect’ of job displacement on social trust. Is it the increasing labor market insecurity in the period preceding unemployment, the actual job loss, or the period after job loss that evoke a decrease in social trust? Nor do we know whether and how unemployment leaves scars on social trust in contexts other than those Protestant, liberal Anglo-Saxon countries. Lastly, previous research failed to address whether it is only people’s own job loss that matters, or whether even other family members’ unemployment experiences contribute to shape people’s trust in others. Using individual panel data (Gender and Generations Program, Swiss Household Panel Study, ESS CRONOS) and comparative longitudinal data from Europe (European Values Study, European Social Survey), this research project contributes to fill this research gap. The results will provide social policy makers and scholars with a thorough understanding about the interplay between welfare states, labor market institutions, unemployment, the Protestant work ethic, and social trust.
Final report
***The purpose, development and implementation of the project***
Social trust, the belief that most other people can be trusted, is an important moral resource that promotes a range of normatively desirable outcomes such as better health, longevity, effectively working democracies and higher economic growth. These qualities have led policymakers to refer (sometimes euphorically) to the Nordic countries’ high levels of social trust as “Nordic gold.” However, against the backdrop of persistently high unemployment in Sweden and beyond, recent findings suggesting that unemployment leaves, even after re-employment, a lasting scar on people’s social trust are therefore alarming. The purpose of this research project was threefold:
1. To examine whether unemployment equally hurts social trust across cultural, religious, and welfare state contexts.
2. To examine whether there is a relationship between the timing of (first-time) unemployment in people’s life span and social trust.
3. To examine whether family-members’ unemployment experiences have short and/or long-term consequences for individuals’ social trust.
While the initial project plan distinguished two work packages – 1) a comparative analysis of time-series cross-sectional data from the European Values Study and the European Social Survey and 2) the longitudinal analysis of individual-level panel data from diverse sources – the PI changed this and focused – also as a result of the consultation with the RJ mid-term evaluation panel – on a novel within-country within-individual comparison of longitudinal panel data from the Swiss Household Panel Study, thus combining the advantages of the original two approaches in a single dataset. Contrary to the original project plan, we decided to exclude data from other individual-level panel studies because they either lacked statistical power due to small sample sizes – a factor that is particularly important when dealing with fixed-effects models – or because they contained too little within-variation concerning trust and/or unemployment experiences. A key novelty of the project was the simultaneous inclusion of contextual, household- and individual characteristics in the analysis of the relationship between unemployment and social trust.
***The project's three most significant results and a discussion of the conclusions***
1. Whether or not having been unemployed at some point in the past hurts social trust in the long run is dependent on cultural and economic factors. Unemployment scarring on social trust is common in predominantly Protestant contexts but not so much in non-Protestant regions. Moreover, analyses of Swiss household panel data corroborate earlier findings from cross-sectional analyses and strengthen Azzolini’s hypothesis of a habitation effect: Individual-level unemployment hurts more the less unemployment is prevalent in a Swiss canton at a given year. From this perspective, periods with rapidly increasing levels of unemployment should, all other things being equal, not lead to a general decline of social trust.
2. The older people are when they experience first-time unemployment, the less it scars social trust. Corroborating hypotheses that social trust is particularly malleable during the formative years, first-time unemployment scars social trust the most if it occurs during adolescence, to a lesser extent during the ages of 20 and 30, and not at all after this life-course period.
3. While data limitations made it hard to understand the mechanisms underlying unemployment scarring of social trust, the project’s findings suggest that it isless about job loss itself and more about the experience of searching for work and being unemployed. Indeed, analyses of panel data from the Swiss Household Panel Study suggest that it does not matter if unemployment follows a period of labor market inactivity (e.g. because of education, military service or care work) or a period of employment: In both cases, the very fact of having been unemployed in the past is associated with a lasting decline of individual-level social trust. Re-employment eases those scars but cannot fully compensate for this loss.
***New research questions***
While having posed some computational challenges during the project, integrating the regional level, the household level, the individual-level and time into a single multilevel model has opened some fascinating avenues for future research that are utterly unexplored in most quantitative research of attitudes and values. This may be partly because households – the primary observation unit of the Swiss Household Panel Study – are not bound to a single region within the country (here: Swiss cantons) but that some households move between regions. Taking this agency into account is important because external factors, e.g. staggering unemployment, might cause households to move to economically more prosperous regions. During the last third of the project, a five-level multiple membership model was successfully implemented to address the complexities of those complex data structures. In the future, this research design will serve as the methodological backbone to study the intergenerational transmission of trust and related values and attitudes from parents to their children with the help of household panel data. Among other questions, this research design will be useful to study why Protestants and those living in predominantly Protestant regions of Switzerland are more trusting than others. It is well established that Protestantism is an important determinant of trust and a moderator of the relationship between unemployment and social trust, but we still know very little about whether it is Protestantism itself or some institutions that developed faster in Protestant regions that contributed to the flourishing of social trust.
***How researchers have disseminated their research and whether and how collaboration has occurred.***
Research from this research project has been presented at the 2024 European Sociological Association (ESA) conference in Porto, at the 2023 European Network for Social Policy Analysis (ESPAnet) autumn meeting in Malmö and at the 2024 Swedish Sociological Association (Sociologidagarna) conference in Gothenburg. The PI gave an invited presentation at the 2023 “The Economics of Culture and Institutions” conference in Vaxholm. Together with associate professor Andreas Bergh, the PI also organized an international workshop on the causes and consequences of trust that was held in Malmö in June 2023. Research from this project was also presented at the internal seminar of the Department of Sociology at Lund University.
The PI collaborated with former PhD student Alexander Saaranen, who completed and defended his PhD thesis on the determinants of adolescents’ social trust at Lund University in June 2025 and who is by now a tenured university lecturer at the University of Borås.
One of the studies has been published in the Journal of European Social Policy, a second one (co-authored with Alexander Saaranen) is currently under review and available as a pre-print (see below). Two further single-authored project-related manuscripts will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals during 2026.
***A list of publications and links to personal websites***
*Peer-reviewed journal articles*
[Open access] Mewes, J. (2023). Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in. Journal of European Social Policy, 34(1), 20-35. https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287231217377
*Preprints*
Mewes, Jan and Saaranen, Alexander (2025): Social Trust and the Scars of (Youth) Unemployment: Evidence from a Long-Running Household Panel. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/cm8tv_v1
The PI's personal websites:
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9TcnW4wAAAAJ&hl=de
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4974-2956
Social trust, the belief that most other people can be trusted, is an important moral resource that promotes a range of normatively desirable outcomes such as better health, longevity, effectively working democracies and higher economic growth. These qualities have led policymakers to refer (sometimes euphorically) to the Nordic countries’ high levels of social trust as “Nordic gold.” However, against the backdrop of persistently high unemployment in Sweden and beyond, recent findings suggesting that unemployment leaves, even after re-employment, a lasting scar on people’s social trust are therefore alarming. The purpose of this research project was threefold:
1. To examine whether unemployment equally hurts social trust across cultural, religious, and welfare state contexts.
2. To examine whether there is a relationship between the timing of (first-time) unemployment in people’s life span and social trust.
3. To examine whether family-members’ unemployment experiences have short and/or long-term consequences for individuals’ social trust.
While the initial project plan distinguished two work packages – 1) a comparative analysis of time-series cross-sectional data from the European Values Study and the European Social Survey and 2) the longitudinal analysis of individual-level panel data from diverse sources – the PI changed this and focused – also as a result of the consultation with the RJ mid-term evaluation panel – on a novel within-country within-individual comparison of longitudinal panel data from the Swiss Household Panel Study, thus combining the advantages of the original two approaches in a single dataset. Contrary to the original project plan, we decided to exclude data from other individual-level panel studies because they either lacked statistical power due to small sample sizes – a factor that is particularly important when dealing with fixed-effects models – or because they contained too little within-variation concerning trust and/or unemployment experiences. A key novelty of the project was the simultaneous inclusion of contextual, household- and individual characteristics in the analysis of the relationship between unemployment and social trust.
***The project's three most significant results and a discussion of the conclusions***
1. Whether or not having been unemployed at some point in the past hurts social trust in the long run is dependent on cultural and economic factors. Unemployment scarring on social trust is common in predominantly Protestant contexts but not so much in non-Protestant regions. Moreover, analyses of Swiss household panel data corroborate earlier findings from cross-sectional analyses and strengthen Azzolini’s hypothesis of a habitation effect: Individual-level unemployment hurts more the less unemployment is prevalent in a Swiss canton at a given year. From this perspective, periods with rapidly increasing levels of unemployment should, all other things being equal, not lead to a general decline of social trust.
2. The older people are when they experience first-time unemployment, the less it scars social trust. Corroborating hypotheses that social trust is particularly malleable during the formative years, first-time unemployment scars social trust the most if it occurs during adolescence, to a lesser extent during the ages of 20 and 30, and not at all after this life-course period.
3. While data limitations made it hard to understand the mechanisms underlying unemployment scarring of social trust, the project’s findings suggest that it isless about job loss itself and more about the experience of searching for work and being unemployed. Indeed, analyses of panel data from the Swiss Household Panel Study suggest that it does not matter if unemployment follows a period of labor market inactivity (e.g. because of education, military service or care work) or a period of employment: In both cases, the very fact of having been unemployed in the past is associated with a lasting decline of individual-level social trust. Re-employment eases those scars but cannot fully compensate for this loss.
***New research questions***
While having posed some computational challenges during the project, integrating the regional level, the household level, the individual-level and time into a single multilevel model has opened some fascinating avenues for future research that are utterly unexplored in most quantitative research of attitudes and values. This may be partly because households – the primary observation unit of the Swiss Household Panel Study – are not bound to a single region within the country (here: Swiss cantons) but that some households move between regions. Taking this agency into account is important because external factors, e.g. staggering unemployment, might cause households to move to economically more prosperous regions. During the last third of the project, a five-level multiple membership model was successfully implemented to address the complexities of those complex data structures. In the future, this research design will serve as the methodological backbone to study the intergenerational transmission of trust and related values and attitudes from parents to their children with the help of household panel data. Among other questions, this research design will be useful to study why Protestants and those living in predominantly Protestant regions of Switzerland are more trusting than others. It is well established that Protestantism is an important determinant of trust and a moderator of the relationship between unemployment and social trust, but we still know very little about whether it is Protestantism itself or some institutions that developed faster in Protestant regions that contributed to the flourishing of social trust.
***How researchers have disseminated their research and whether and how collaboration has occurred.***
Research from this research project has been presented at the 2024 European Sociological Association (ESA) conference in Porto, at the 2023 European Network for Social Policy Analysis (ESPAnet) autumn meeting in Malmö and at the 2024 Swedish Sociological Association (Sociologidagarna) conference in Gothenburg. The PI gave an invited presentation at the 2023 “The Economics of Culture and Institutions” conference in Vaxholm. Together with associate professor Andreas Bergh, the PI also organized an international workshop on the causes and consequences of trust that was held in Malmö in June 2023. Research from this project was also presented at the internal seminar of the Department of Sociology at Lund University.
The PI collaborated with former PhD student Alexander Saaranen, who completed and defended his PhD thesis on the determinants of adolescents’ social trust at Lund University in June 2025 and who is by now a tenured university lecturer at the University of Borås.
One of the studies has been published in the Journal of European Social Policy, a second one (co-authored with Alexander Saaranen) is currently under review and available as a pre-print (see below). Two further single-authored project-related manuscripts will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals during 2026.
***A list of publications and links to personal websites***
*Peer-reviewed journal articles*
[Open access] Mewes, J. (2023). Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in. Journal of European Social Policy, 34(1), 20-35. https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287231217377
*Preprints*
Mewes, Jan and Saaranen, Alexander (2025): Social Trust and the Scars of (Youth) Unemployment: Evidence from a Long-Running Household Panel. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/cm8tv_v1
The PI's personal websites:
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9TcnW4wAAAAJ&hl=de
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4974-2956