Digital Connectivity and Trust Reallocation in an Early Internet Context: Evidence from Pre-Arab Spring Egypt

This paper uses nationally representative 2008 World Values Survey data from Egypt (N=3,051) to ask how early-stage digital connectivity relates to where people place their trust, not just how much they trust in general. I treat personal computer use as a proxy for early digital capability in a low-penetration context (~18% internet usage nationally). Using logistic regression with governorate-clustered standard errors and average marginal effects, I show that, conditional on demographics, SES, urban residence, religiosity, and political engagement, computer users are more likely to trust socially distant out-groups (people of another religion and nationality, +7 to +11 percentage points) and slightly less likely to highly trust neighbors (-2 to -8 percentage points). I then introduce a within-respondent parochialism index (neighbor trust minus out-group trust on a four-point scale) and show that computer users exhibit a significantly smaller trust gap, consistent with a “trust reallocation” pattern toward more bridging, less parochial trust. Results are robust to alternate codings and sex-correcting weights. I am careful not to make causal claims and explicitly discuss selection, measurement ceilings, survey-design limitations, and alternative mechanisms.