cohesion profiles of these countries can thus be said be in agreement with the
definitions of social cohesion proposed by the Council of Europe, Chan et al and
Kearns and Forrest and to approximate that of Green et al. Whether the profiles of
these countries can be conceived of as distinct regional and historically evolved
regimes of social cohesion, which would be supportive of the particularist
perspective, or only as an accidental and short-lived combination of conditions is a
question I will return to below. For now, the finding that the four conceptions of
social cohesion do not reflect coherent phenomena but only the profiles of a few
specific countries indicates that these conceptions are unlikely to represent forms of
social cohesion that can easily be pursued and adopted by other countries. Their
usefulness in policy terms may thus be quite limited.
Figure 1 about here
Assessing the universalist perspective
This leads us to the question whether the observed factors are related to stages of
socio-economic development. If they are, the universalist/modernist perspective
would be supported and the forms of social cohesion they represent might be
amenable to policy intervention. It needs to be noted, however, that this study’s
identification of (at least) two factors of social cohesion is difficult to reconcile with
the universalist perspective as this perspective would expect to find a single,
universally valid syndrome of social cohesion. I used World Bank data on purchasing
power parity (PPP) (World Bank 2001) as a proxy for socio-economic development:
the higher the PPP per capita of a country, the more advanced I consider its stage of
development to be. Figures 2 and 3 show that there are highly significant positive
links between PPP per capita and each of the two social cohesion factors. The link
with solidarity is particularly strong: PPP per capita explains as much as 43 per cent
of the variation in solidarity. Thus, solidarity and participation indeed appear to be a
function of level of development, which is in agreement with the universalist
perspective.
Considering again the composition of both factors, the direction of the relation
moreover makes sense, particularly for the solidarity factor: the more advanced a
country is socio-economically, the more trusting, equal, safe, and tolerant its society
is, and the more likely it is to combine consensus on basic values with pluralism on
substantive values. This concurs with theoretical expectations. Social trust is likely to
represent trust in the anonymous fellow citizen as it was tapped with the item “most
people can be trusted / you cannot be too careful”. This kind of „thin’ trust is typically
high in advanced post-industrial states where the bonds between the citizens are
manifold and based on mutual dependencies. By contrast, „thick’ exclusionary forms
of trust reflecting close relations with family members and suspicion of strangers are
characteristic of isolated rural communities which predominate in societies in the
early stage of modernization (Newton 1999). Likewise, it is not surprising to find
advanced states having more equal societies. The burgeoning middle classes,
dwindling working classes and extensive public welfare systems of these states have
significantly reduced inequalities of income and opportunity. The rapidly
industrializing societies in the take-off phase modernization, in contrast, are coping
with dramatic inequalities (Kuznets 1955). It also makes sense to expect order and