Strangers and Foreigners: Trust and Attitudes toward Citizenship

We analyze the relationship between natives’ attitudes towards citizenship acquisition for foreigners and trust. Our hypothesis is that, in sub-Saharan Africa, the
slave trade represents the deep factor behind contemporary attitudes toward citizenship, with more intense exposure to historical slave exports for an individual’s
ethnic group being associated with contemporary distrust for strangers, and in turn
opposition to citizenship laws that favor the inclusion of foreigners. We find that
individuals who are more trusting do show more positive attitudes towards the acquisition of citizenship at birth for children of foreigners, that these attitudes are
also negatively related to the intensity of the slave trade, and that the underlying
link between trust and the slave trade is confirmed. Alternative factors—conflict,
kinship, and witchcraft beliefs—that, through trust, may affect attitudes toward
citizenship, are not generating the same distinctive pattern of linkages emerging
from the slave trade.