In this “Conversations with Authors,” we spoke with Scott F. Abramson, David B. Carter, and Luwei Ying, to discuss their APSR article “Historical Border Changes, State Building, and Contemporary Trust in Europe.”

APSR: What are the aims of your paper?

Luwei Ying: The aim of our paper is to really link a deep historical cause [border changes] to contemporary political phenomena [political attitudes such as trust]. We want to show people how things can carry over through extensive periods of time.

David Carter: One thing this paper addresses is that there is work on contemporary and long-term effects of boundaries, focused on how individual behavior is shaped by boundaries. What’s missing from this growing literature is much evidence of how this actually works. We view our paper as an explanation of how legacies of border changes matter for individual behavior while also trying to locate a specific aspect of individual behavior that is extremely important in this relationship.

Scott Abramson: There’s lots of theoretical evidence linking borders between states, and borders in general, to macro-level outcomes. There is empirical evidence supporting these theories, but what’s missing are the micro-level mechanisms leading to these macro-level outcomes. Our big motivation, then, is to provide some of the first micro-level evidence showing that borders have a persistent, individual-level impact on important political phenomena like political trust. This paper links IR literature on borders and territories to comparative politics and political economy literature on social trust.

APSR: What did you find most difficult in researching or writing about this topic?

Luwei Ying: I found it very difficult to study historical phenomena like border changes with quantitative data and methods. Measuring border changes over thousands of years was not easy. From there, we need to identify and collect a series of pre-treatment variables for causal inference. Virtually all the data we’re used to working with, such as GDP or regime type, is post-treatment, which provided a prominent empirical challenge to this paper.

Scott Abramson: We establish an association between patterns of historical border information and trust. The hardest part for us, I think, is developing a theory for why we observe this association. What exactly about these patterns of border changes and state-building would have this persisting effect and what are the empirical implications of this effect that are testable in the data? This was a challenge reviewers pointed out as well. We don’t want to just demonstrate empirical regularities; we want to develop a theory linking these patterns of history to patterns of individual behavior. This was the most difficult part of the paper, and one I know my co-authors would agree with.

APSR: What most surprised or excited you as you were conducting your research for the article?

Luwei Ying: For me, this gave me a chance to learn some new IR literature and relate this literature to other political science subfields.

David Carter: As Scott noted before, we all come from this IR literature on borders and territoriality and conflict, and then the literatures on social and political trust and their origins are massive. Engaging with these literatures, and finding a way to make a theoretical and empirical contribution in this new realm was quite challenging, but also fun and interesting—and quite rewarding!

APSR: How do you see your research speaking to current events, or relating to contemporary political issues?

David Carter: One of the things the paper does is it locates a deeply historical source of trust deficits. We could think of a deficit of political trust in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. I think we could say a deficit of political trust was definitely linked to tragic outcomes throughout the pandemic, in terms of citizens’ reception to government directives and their trust in the government institutions giving these directives. I think our paper identifying political trust’s link to historical sources can inform thinking solutions to trust deficit problems. For example, if deeply rooted [historical] sources of trust are linked, in part, to individual-level attitudes in a given region, it’s not clear that one can remedy lack of trust with short-term PR campaigns like the OECD and the UN have advocated for during the pandemic.

Luwei Ying: I think we can think of our impact even outside of the context of trust. People tend to attribute current problems with deep historical causes, and I think this is particularly true in non-Western societies. I study the Islamic world, where when a problem occurs people are quick to identify historical context as a source of contemporary problems. This sort of thinking is so natural in societies with long and rich histories. In the Western world, particularly the US and Europe, we sometimes tend to ignore historical context and focus on the modernity of these societies. In this sense, our paper is looking at the most difficult case: historical context in the Western world. Our paper is important in that it shows historical context matters in all societies.

APSR: What questions still puzzle you about this research topic? How might you continue this line of work?

David Carter: One thing I remain interested in exploring here is to dig more deeply into the mechanisms we discuss in the paper. Our ability to provide detailed evidence for the mechanisms we identified is limited by our use of existing surveys which were not, of course, designed with our research project in mind. Moving forward there’s an opportunity to find clever ways to either measure historical features that are theoretically linked to mechanisms or to think of survey designs that would more cleanly tap into mechanisms empirically.

Scott Abramson: Building on David’s point, working on this paper has gotten me thinking about outcome measures and just how poor measures of trust can be in any survey. Are we capturing trust as a belief in reciprocal play? Much of what is being captured in existing survey measures is trust as a belief and trust as a preference or taste. Theoretically, trust is defined as a belief in reciprocally cooperative play, but these survey measures only partially tap into that.  So, our work has gotten me thinking about ways of eliciting the outcome measure of trust correctly that also comports with our theoretical definitions of trust.

Luwei Ying: There are certainly a lot of potential follow-up projects here, but I will focus on one. In this paper, we capture the official borders from history but in a lot of cases the unofficial institutions matter a lot in people’s lives. Moving forward it would be really interesting to combine official borders with the actual administrative capacity of governments at different points and see how these different factors interact and affect politics over time.

– Scott F. Abramson University of Rochester

– David B. Carter Washington University in St. Louis

– Luwei Ying University of California, Los Angeles

– The authors’ APSR paper is published as open access.