Latov Yu.V. The effects of institutional and interpersonal trust as social capital in modern Russian society. Journal of Institutional Studies. 2025. Vol. 17. No. 4. P. 62–80.

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: https://hjournal.ru/files/JIS_17_4/JIS_17.4_5.pdf (дата обращения 10.01.2026)

Abstract

The growing importance of social capital is seen as a manifestation of the growing public nature of production. The most important characteristic of social capital is indicators of institutional and interpersonal trust, analyzed using data from representative nationwide sociological surveys conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the 2020s. The return on social capital as a public good is verified as an increase in participation in patriotic volunteering (voluntary assistance to SMO participants in Ukraine with money and goods, assistance to the families of SMO participants, etc.), associated with increased trust in institutions and individuals. Using survey data conducted in the spring of 2024, the hypothesis was tested: the higher the respondents' trust indicators, the more often they voluntarily helped their fellow citizens fighting in the war. This hypothesis was confirmed with regard to institutional trust. Specifically, while almost 56% of Russians who distrust the President of the Russian Federation do not participate in patriotic volunteering, considering assistance to SMO participants to be the sole responsibility of the state, only 24% of those who trust the President do so. However, with regard to interpersonal personalized trust, the hypothesis being tested found weak support: Russians with higher trust in their neighbors differed little in their participation in helping SMO participants; by some characteristics, they were even less inclined to do so. The observed patterns were explained using the Marxist concept of the growth of the social character of production in the broad sense. Higher returns, understood as increased benefits for society as a whole, are achieved by those elements of social capital associated with solidarity at the level of larger communities (in the empirical data examined, within the Russian nation). Conversely, individual membership in small communities (social networks) is less associated with an increase in public goods; cohesion at the micro level can even weaken society as a whole.