levels of social hierarchy and surprisingly high levels of value pluralism and ethnic
tolerance. I found no evidence at all for a distinctive liberal English-speaking regime
of social cohesion.
Due to data limitations, I could only assess the regime stability for this limited
group of Western countries, however. Possibly, the particularist perspective would
have received more solid support had I been able to examine social cohesion
characteristics longitudinally for other world regions, such as Latin America and the
post-communist countries. Particularly over-time public opinion data is in short
supply for these regions. It is therefore recommendable that future research exploring
the dynamics of social cohesion in non-western contexts rely less on attitudinal and
more on behavioral indicators (also as proxies for attitudes), using records and other
archival material as data sources.
Notwithstanding the indicative and incomplete conclusions of this study
regarding the validity of the universalist and particularist perspectives, I believe to
have advanced the research on social cohesion in two other ways. First, the discovery
that civic participation does not co-vary at the national level with social trust indicates
the limited empirical utility of social capital-inspired definitions of social cohesion,
such as the aforementioned one by Chan To and Chan. After all, the non-relation
between trust and participation suggests that it is very difficult to develop forms of
social cohesion that combine the two. Yet, and secondly, this does not exclude the
possibility that there are countries combining relatively high levels of trust and civic
participation (or any of the other characteristics of social cohesion seen as precious
and worth pursuing for that matter). In fact, our analyses found the Scandinavian
countries to manifest just such forms of social cohesion. They constitute so to speak
the living proof for many theoretical and normative understandings of the concept.
Yet, since the kind of social cohesion seen in Scandinavian countries is likely to
constitute a regime, i.e. a path-dependent stable collection of characteristics unique to
the region, it cannot be adopted by other countries or only with great difficulty. In this
sense, definitions of social cohesion that reflect such regimes present unattainable
forms of social cohesion, i.e. forms not achievable by other states. By contrast, efforts
to reduce income inequality and crime and to enhance trust and consensus on basic
values simultaneously could well be effective since these components do co-vary
cross-nationally (to form the „solidarity’ syndrome alluded to above) and are closely
related to socio-economic development. We thus believe that the value of this paper
lies in having identified a form of social cohesion that can realistically be pursued.
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