Webinars

Specifically, we identify to what extent voter segments especially at the lower end of the middle class spectrum drifted ideologically away from the majority's emancipatory progression on immigration, sexuality and sustainability issues, thus increasing value polarization in ways that erode institutional trust and diminish support for liberal democracy, again especially in the lower middle class spectrum, with the consequence of increased readiness to support RWP in its efforts to weaken democracy’s liberal constitutional elements. Contradicting this "democracy eroding" narrative, our preliminary results provide no consistent confirmation that polarizing ideological shifts among European electorates' middle-class segments account for growing institutional distrust or anti-liberal shifts in voters' democratic preferences. Moreover, RWP-supporters are social class-wise only weakly differentiated and do not show a particularly high concentration in the lower middle class. Instead, the nature of their distinction is primarily socio-psychological, manifest in a deep-seated opposition against the non-RWP parties' liberal consent on immigration policy and the resulting institutional distrust for not having a voice among the parties of the pre-RWP era. These two distinctions –immigration opposition and its associated institutional distrust– reach into all middle-class segments and exist in spite of the fact that, overall, European electorates and especially their middle-class spectrum have actually become more (instead of less) tolerant of cultural diversity and immigration. We conclude that the problems accounting for RWP’s success do not originate in the electorates and the supposedly reactionary public opinion shifts in parts of them. Instead, the problems reside in accrued representation deficits with respect to grown non-voter camps whose immigration skepticism found no credible voice in the party systems of the pre-RWP era [click here for the full paper text].

While nowadays Social Sciences employ various methods of trust measurement (including game simulations, field observations, laboratory and field experiments, case studies, formal modelling, expert surveys and performance indices etc.), longitudinal macro and micro national panel surveys and cross-sectional comparative surveys remain among the main approaches to the data collection on trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer, Pew Research Center, the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, Eurobarometer, Gallup World Poll are only a few examples of the prominent research centres and survey programs that conduct regular measurement of political trust. Yet, each study employs its own set of indicators and scales, captures levels of trust, mistrust, or distrust; these measures vary in the validity and reliability of findings, sometimes showing contradicting patterns and trends.

The aim of this webinar was to examine in comparative perspective the methodological approaches to the trust measurement employed by OECD, Edelman Trust Institute, and Pew Global Attitudes Survey. The webinar debated on the advantages and limitations of the existing measures of perceptions of trust and whether and how they allow to establish correlations between the perceptions of trust as expressed by citizens on one side, and the trustworthiness of institutions (whether measured by citizens' perceptions or objective performance indicators) on the other, and how establishing such correlation facilitates interpretation of the survey findings.