Does Trust Matter? The Impact of Trust on Workers' Perceptions of Job and Employment Insecurity

This thesis sets out to investigate the relationship between trust and workers’ perceptions of insecurity. Going beyond previous research, it examines whether trust impacts workers’ insecurity and whether this effect differs across countries. We tackle this issue by using a cross-sectional data set from the European Social Survey (2010). Additionally, this research aims to expand more on the causation process by employing a panel data set from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2000-2017). These questions are answered, first by providing possible mechanisms of this relationship and secondly by analysing both cross-sectional and longitudinal data to check for their validity. The thesis claims that trust can be treated as a source of social capital which improves the capacity of workers to respond to insecurity. We show that trust does impact workers’ perceptions of insecurity. More precisely, we find that societal trust and institutional trust are important predictors of job and employment insecurity. However, the results are more ambivalent when it comes to social trust on the individual level and organizational trust.