TRUEDEM KICK OFF MEETING

Political trust has long been regarded as an important element of regime support and factor of regime stability; it is widely associated with a number of positive outcomes in representative democracies. The project will facilitate development of a new paradigm of political trust and trust-building and will inspire emergence of new insights on the multi-facet origins of political trust and multi-factor nature of trustworthiness. While there is a growing concern about the crisis of democracy and democratic backsliding, this research effort will provide an innovative theoretical perspective on the sources of regime support and strategies for trust building in the public domain. The project will develop a comprehensive and transparent toolbox of short-term and long-term policy interventions for enhancing trust in political institutions, boosting transparency, and inclusiveness of representative systems in Europe. The project has partners in Austria, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Ukraine. 

Since the Civic Culture, political trust has long been regarded as vital for the stability of liberal democracies. Regime legitimacy relies on the consent of the governed. But such compliance should be earned, not blindly given. Citizens should trust authorities which have proved competent, honest and impartial in the past and thus are likely to be trustworthy in future. By contrast, credulous faith in ineffectual, mendacious, or corrupt authorities can undermine liberal democracy and the public good.  Like many other complex and hazardous decisions, making informed and accurate judgments about trustworthiness is a challenging process. Agency performance and accountability safeguards (measured by objective indicators) are likely to affect public perceptions (monitored by subjective judgments). In the second step, subjective public perceptions are expected to influence their views of agency trustworthiness and the decision about trust, respectively. What explains systematic biases in flawed decisions about trustworthy relationships?

There is infallible evidence that public trust in government is melting down. This happens in all post-industrial democracies and the meltdown continues at a glacial pace that has long-term implications. Most observers of this trend are concerned or even alarmed about the decline in trust because the downturn not only affects trust in government in a narrow sense but is the symptom of a broad decline in people’s trust in all sorts of societal institutions, from courts to the police to companies and the media (Hooghe 2015). The concerns about falling public trust in institutions derive from the assumption that public trust is a form of social capital that institutions need to function properly. Some scholars, on the other hand, see the causal connection in a reverse order and argue that public trust is an outcome, rather than a pre-condition, of high-quality government. Perhaps, however, the relationship between the quality of government and public trust is inherently symbiotic, such that both work together in creating either vicious or virtuous cycles in which both public trust and “good” government spiral downwards (vicious) or upward (virtuous). 

Multiple crises (pandemic, security & energy/economic crisis) hit Slovakia during the last electoral cycle. The crises´ effects and political responses to them might hampered political trust of citizens. On the other hand, literature suggests in time of insecurity and crisis, people turn to the political institutions and their trust towards them might increase. The panel look sat actual trends in political trust in selected EU countries. It also discusses the effects of such trends in the context of parliamentary elections and electoral support for political extremists. The panel draws the comparison among countries like Italy, Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Moderator: Andrej Matišák, journalist. Panelists: Domenico Maddaloni, University of Salerno (Italy); Edit Zgut-Przybylska, Polish Academy of Sciences, Visegrad Insight (Poland); Pavol Baboš, Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia).

In the last decades, various transformative social phenomena hit the European democracies and put into question the capacity of national and supranational (EU) institutions to react in prompt and adequate manner. Such phenomena include the COVID-19 pandemic; security crisis and following migration & refugee waves (from Ukraine, Syria, and other countries) but also structural changes as digitalization of work. In addition to that, transformation of media consumption (as a main channel for political communication in democracies) has also been present over the last decade. The panel asks questions: what are the consequences of such transformative processes on representative democracies in Europe? How does it influence political trust in European democracies? What democratic innovations might be adopted in response to such processes and are they needed?

Moderator: Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia).  Panelists: Sokratis Koniordos, University of the Peloponnese (Greece); Agnieszka Turska-Kawa, University of Silesia (Poland); Frederic Gonthier, Grenoble Alpes University (France); Alenka Krašovec, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia).