Social Traps and the Problem of Trust

Bo Rothstein explores how social capital and social trust are generated and what governments can do about it. A 'social trap' is a situation where individuals, groups or organizations are unable to cooperate owing to mutual distrust and lack of social capital, even where cooperation would benefit all. Examples include civil strife, pervasive corruption, ethnic discrimination, depletion of natural resources and misuse of social insurance systems. Much has been written attempting to explain the problem, but rather less material is available on how to escape it.

Bo Rothstein is the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at the Göteborg University in Sweden. Among his publications in English are The Social Democratic State: The Swedish Model and The Bureaucratic Problems of Social Reforms (1996), Just Institutions Matters: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State (Cambridge, 1998), Restructuring the Welfare State (co-edited with Sven Steinmo, 2003) and Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Societies (co-edited with Janos Kornia and Susan Rose-Ackerman, 2004).