But what does it take to move a society from an inefficient equilibrium, characterized by low social capital, distrust and inefficient legal and political institutions, to the opposite situation?

The starting point of this lecture is the dynamics of social trust. What is social trust and how can we understand its main function in society? How does trust evolve and change? Which are the major research challenges in our attempts to understand and analyze the dynamics of social trust?

Different theoretical and empirical approaches to how social trust is generated, maintained and destroyed will be presented.

About Bo Rothstein
Bo Rothstein holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, Cornell University, Harvard University, Collegium Budapest Center for Advanced Study, the Swedish Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Among his publications in English are Social Traps and the Problem of Trust (Cambridge University Press 2005), The Social Democratic State: The Swedish Model and the Bureaucratic Problems of Social Reforms (University of Pittsburgh Press 1996) and Just Institutions Matters: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State (Cambridge University Press 1998).

He is a regular contributor in the Swedish public debate about politics, the welfare state and labor market policy.

Together with professor Sören Holmberg, he is in charge of the newly established Quality of Government Institute at Gothenburg University. His current research interests are comparative quality of government institutions, social capital and social dilemmas, and political corruption.