Education and Trust in Finland : Evidence from the European Social Survey Round 11

Abstract

Trust is a fundamental element of democratic governance and social cohesion. In societies where citizens trust their institutions and one another, higher levels of cooperation, legal compliance, and support for collective policy decisions are observed. Trust is a multidimensional concept: institutional trust refers to citizens’ confidence in political and legal institutions, while societal or generalized trust refers to the expectation that most people are trustworthy and fair. Although cross-national research has established that education is associated with trust, this relationship is context-dependent and varies with institutional quality. Finland is consistently characterized as a high-trust society, yet few studies have examined whether education-based trust gradients persist within such a context, and fewer still have simultaneously compared education’s association with both institutional and societal trust using recent nationally representative data. This thesis addresses that gap. Using the European Social Survey Round 11 integrated dataset (Edition 4.1), the thesis tests whether education level is associated with institutional trust and societal trust. Institutional trust is operationalized as a four-item mean index (trust in parliament, the legal system, the police, and politicians; Cronbach’s α ≈ .83), and societal trust as a three-item mean index (perceived trustworthiness, fairness, and helpfulness of others; α ≈ .72). Education is grouped into three ISCED-based categories: low (ISCED 0–2), medium (ISCED 3–4), and high (ISCED 5–8). The analytic sample size is around n = 1,560 and slightly differs across analyses due to missing responses. Welch’s ANOVA results indicate that higher education is significantly associated with higher institutional trust (F(2, 628.41) = 34.23, p < .001, η² ≈ .041) and higher societal trust (F(2, 627.30) = 25.88, p < .001, η² ≈ .031). In both cases, the high-education group reports notably higher trust than the low- and medium-education groups, which do not differ meaningfully from each other. No meaningful gender difference in institutional trust is found. These findings demonstrate that trust in Finland is comparatively high on average but not evenly distributed across education groups. These findings matter because trust is not only an individual attitude but a governance resource that shapes compliance, cooperation, and the legitimacy of collective decisions. If trust is stratified by education even in a high-trust society, then the headline position of Finland in international trust and well-being rankings can obscure meaningful within-country inequalities. The thesis discusses these findings in relation to institutional theories of trust, examines possible mechanisms linking education to trust, and reflects on what education-based trust gradients imply for social cohesion and governance in Finland, including in policy areas such as sustainable urban development that depend on broad public legitimacy.