# **4 Social Capital, Socio-Demographics and Trust**

While this paper focuses on institutional trust, the survey also contained variables related to social trust. In the literature, the concept of social trust is often closely linked to the concept of social capital popularized by Putnam. Social trust represents trust between individuals within society, across a range of social ties. Social trust can be measured by asking respondents to assess their degree of trust to a generalized ‘other” (radius of trust), or to a list of di↵erent categories of individuals, starting from those who are close (e.g. friends and family) and extending to those who are more distant (e.g. people met for the first time, foreigners).<sup>19</sup> In this section, we explore the interaction between social trust and institutional trust.

We estimate the relation between institutional trust and social trust, as well as other socio-demographics, using the following model: Controls include a range of socio-demographic variables including: gender, urban/rural location, age, education, and income.

Levels of social trust in Morocco appear to be quite low. The survey data indicates that only 56 percent of respondents think that Moroccans trust each other. It also shows that interpersonal trust in Morocco is disproportionately geared toward in-groups, such as family, friend, and neighbors, rather than toward more distant groups such as individuals from a di↵erent religion, locality or nationality. Specifically, 94 percent report having high or very high levels of trust in their family; compared to 63 percent who report high or very high trust levels for friends, 63 percent for neighbors, 60 percent for work colleagues, and as low as 28 percent for people of other locality or nationality.<sup>20</sup> This echoes a previous World Bank study that found that “while low trust in outgroups is a

> 19Generalized social trust is measured in standard survey items by simply asking whether respondents feel that “in general, people can be trusted” or whether ‘you can’t be too careful” whom you trust. This measure of interpersonal trust fails to di↵erentiate between di↵erent types of social ties. In contrast, the notion of a radius of trust explores particularized trust, this is the trust that individuals have across a range of social ties. In surveys, the radius of trust battery questions ask respondents to assess their degree of trust not to a generalized “others”, but to a list of di↵erent categories of individuals, starting from those that are close, such as neighbors, friends and family, and extending to those that are more distant, such as for example people met for the first time or foreigners. The latter approach, labeled “radius of trust”, thus helps assess not only the degree of trust but also the extent to which individuals are willing to extend their trust beyond their narrow community, to embrace individuals on whom they have little prior information or moral claim.

> 20These figures are consistent with the survey estimates of the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis, which has tracked social trust in its three publications, see MIPA 2020a, MIPA 2021, MIPA 2022. In 2020, MIPA found that family is the most trusted social institution. The Moroccans surveyed feel that family as well as close friends are the most trustworthy people within their entourage: 95.2 % of Moroccans surveyed saying they trust family while 42.9 % of

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