Social justice, ethnic diversity, trust and the quality of government

The Blavatnik School of Government is pleased to announce an Inaugural Lecture to be given by Bo Rothstein, Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. Professor Rothstein will adress the topic: 'Social Justice, Ethnic Diversity, Trust and the Quality of Government'.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

The lecture is open to the public, registration is now to capacity.  The event will be streamed live and recorded on the Blavatnik School of Government YouTube channel.

Abstract

What makes some societies more prone to social solidarity than others? One answer has been political mobilisation from the left but empirical research shows that this has become less relevant. Another answer has been that ethnic diversity hampers social solidarity but empirical research has produced an array of divergent results. This can be explained if we take into account the quality of political institutions. Where government institutions are seen as impartial and non-corrupt, citizens express greater trust in co-citizens and express greater support for equality-promoting policies. Moreover, this effect of high quality public institutions trumps the negative effect of diversity, findings that diversity erodes social trust disappear when quality of government is controlled for. The conclusion is that also In increasingly diverse societies, social solidarity can be manufactured by institutional design.

Biography

Bo Rothstein is Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College. Before coming to Oxford he held the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at University of Gothenburg in Sweden where he was co-founder and head of the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute. He took his PhD in Political Science at Lund University and before coming to Gothenburg he was assistant and associate professor at Uppsala University. Bo has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, Collegium Budapest for Advanced Study, Harvard University, University of Washington-Seattle, Cornell University, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Australian National University and Stanford University. His book Corruption and the Opposite of Corruption will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. His recent books English are The Quality of Government: Corruption, Inequality and Social Trust in International Perspective (University of Chicago Press 2011 and the co-edited volume Good Government: The Relevance of Political Science (Edward Elgar 2012). Among his other books in English are Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State and Social Traps and the Problem of Trust (both published by Cambridge University Press). He has published in journals such as World Politics, World Development, Comparative Politics, Governance, Comparative Political Studies and Politics & Society. Since 2012 he is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2003, he was awarded a Leading Scholars grant by the Swedish Science Council and in 2013 he received an Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council.