They're high trust societies in general, partially because they're small monocultures. As Robert Putnam's research shows, in multicultural societies, especially large ones, trust rapidly declines, surprisingly even within cultural groups. Trust in government falls even more rapidly as each group starts to perceive those in power as being more favorable to one group or another, even if those in power are from their own cultural group.

I've distinctly noticed this in my own life, being born and raised in the western US, but having lived throughout the US, my trust in my "fellow Americans" declines the further away from the mountain west I get. My spouse is Finnish, and we've lived in Finland for years, and have independently observed that their homogeneous society definitely makes their rosy politics possible. I bring this up when people try to compare US and Finnish domestic politics. There is often a "it works in <Finno/Scandinavia>!" rhetoric when discussing health care, schools, or whatever. Comparatively, Finnish politics are boring and uneventful.

"High trust" seems entirely contradictory to Danish society. Universal skepticism and a universal dislike for every other human in existence are the core ideologies here.

Maybe a tendency to not interfere with tasks assigned to others to avoid having to deal with people is being misinterpreted as trust?

The data suggest that the Danes are very trusting, but they may not be measuring what you experience: https://ourworldindata.org/trust

No. My Norwegian colleagues trust that they will receive healthcare. They trust that their representatives in the government are acting more or less in good faith. They trust that money in the government is going towards protections and services and infrastructure. And if you look around in Norway, you can generally get the feeling that the government is taking care of things.

Go to America and it seems like the country is a decayed husk wrapped in gold. Roads are barely functional. Schools do not educate children. Each day there is a new story about a politician who is corrupt either through insider trading, being a pedo, or whatever. The government of America does not appear to do things for Americans.

Thus, it's easy to see why you can trust the government in Norway but not in America to me.

Exactly... it's the mono-culture and relatively small population and distances that allow this to work relatively well. If the US actually reverted closer to the original Confederation it was started as, each state could possibly do these things, but as a whole, it's really hard... and becomes ever more divisive... At this point, largely, only corporate interests feeding both sides seem to get anything done.

But don't you know that the only reason people want to have more control over their own lives and influence state politics is to be racist? That is why we must entrust the federal government with more and more power to run everything (with the help of The Experts™, who all happen to go to the same few schools).

No it's not. Norway overall is 75% ethnic Norwegian with the rest being immigrants. Oslo the capital is only 50% ethnic Norwegian. It's very strange to me to identify Norway as monoculture. Usually i think the person has never been to Norway when they say that.

How many of those immigrants are allowed to vote? The US, by contrast has a massive amount of immigrant populations, multiple generations in with varied backgrounds, over a massively larger scale of both population and land mass. My high school didn't have a majority from any single racial group.

Your description of America sounds very east coast. Please keep in mind that part of the country is a shit hole with lots of shitty people.

Americans really think their schools don't provide solid education, it's so weird. Look at your PISA scores, they're reasonable. Could be a lot better, sure, but so could almost everything. Especially if you take into account how most countries with better education systems have less than a 1/3 of the population, are mostly developed monocultural nation-states, so a lot more capable of standardizing public services nationwide.

> No. My Norwegian colleagues trust that they will receive healthcare. They trust that their representatives in the government are acting more or less in good faith. They trust that money in the government is going towards protections and services and infrastructure.

This is not quite true in Denmark.

There's have been multiple cases in recent times with the government willingly taking illegal action. Trust in public health care is that it'll keep you alive, but that's getting a nurse to look at you takes half a workday and the majority of the staff is running away due to poor pay. Those needing psychological help have generally been neglected, and those with gender identity issues are borderline abused. Environmental policies are "revised" as we get close to the deadline and haven't made the progress needed.

So I would not say that there is trust in the government and its services - merely an understanding that as change is very slow, you can expect the same tomorrow as you do today. That the US is worse is somewhat of a different discussion to whether or not the Danish people is a "high trust" society.

I don’t think you can describe at least Sweden and Norway as monocultural. They’ve had waves of immigration since the world wars and I think Sweden had the most immigration per capita in Europe during the Syrian refuge crisis.

That’s not to say it’s a rosy picture of multiculturalism, there has been at least a building up of angst in the minority parties over immigration (and islam).

Don't mistake trust for tacit consent. Trust is never valid in politics.

Rather, "trusting" a system which makes it so that you do not need to trust any government.

Having many large political parties and a trend of (almost) always having minority governments also help limit possible damage.

I don't really feel like there is a large number of parties in Norway when arbeiterpartiet wins 35% of the vote every time and Parliament switch between them and the conservative party. And this time around the farming party really decided to screw things up for the coalition. But I suppose this is better then the republicans and the democrats for (insert whatever reason you want here).

In Denmark, the biggest party "only" got 27% of the votes, and 12 parties ended up in parlament.

But yes, the comparison was mainly to the whacky US system with just two sides to pick from.

Don't forget the other reason: a homogenous society.