Findings from the TRUEDEM project were presented by the WP4 leader Prof. Christian Welzel (Professor of Political Culture at Leuphana University, Germany and Vice President of World Values Survey Association) in a keynote address "Mass polarization, institutional distrust & the breakdown of democracy?" at the conference (De)polarisation in values, attitudes and beliefs: comparative perspectives conducted by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, in partnership with the World Values Survey Association, UCL and the Behavioural Insights Team. In this keynote address, Prof. Welzel presented the key findings of the working paper "Cultural background of European democracies: examining the role of values and social inequalities" prepared within WP4. 

Findings from the TRUEDEM project were presented by the project Co-PI Prof.Pippa Norris (Harvard University, USA) in a keynote address "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”: Fractionalized and polarized party systems in Western democracies" at the conference (De)polarisation in values, attitudes and beliefs: comparative perspectives conducted by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, in partnership with the World Values Survey Association, UCL and the Behavioural Insights Team. 

Abstract: Jean Blondel made many lasting contributions towards comparative politics, not least in his classification of party systems in Western democracies. Does Blondel’s typology of  remain relevant today -- or does it require substantial revision? And, does party system fragmentation predict ideological polarization? Part I sets out the theoretical framework. Part II compares trends from 1960-2020 in party system fragmentation in a wide range of democracies, measured by the effective number of parties in the electorate and in parliament. Not surprisingly, the effective number of electoral parties (ENEP) has generally grown in each country across Western democracies, from an average of around 3.5 parties in the 1960s to 5.1 during the last decade. But caution is in order: this does not imply, however, that party systems are necessarily more polarized ideologically. Part III examines polarization in party systems across Western democracies, measured by standard deviations around the mean of several ideological values and issue positions in each country. The findings suggest that party system fractionalization and polarization should be treated as two distinct and unrelated dimensions of party competition; in fact, two-party systems like the US can be far more polarized ideologically than fragmented multiparty systems like Belgium. The conclusion reflects on the broader implications of the findings for understanding party polarization and threats of backsliding in democratic states.

TRUEDEM project is seeking proposals for data collection services for its online survey. The selected vendor will be responsible for conducting data collection for the TRUEDEM online survey in up to 11 European countries: Austria; Czechia; France; Germany; Greece; Italy; Poland; Romania; Slovakia; Slovenia; Sweden. The survey aims to explore political trust attitudes to democratic institutions among the adult population. The sample size in every country is N=1500 (completed interviews). Target audience: adult population in the age 18+ years, residents of the listed above countries. All samples should be representative of the population structure in terms of gender, age, income, education, urban/rural settlement patterns. The questionnaire comprising of about 180 variables will be provided by the TRUEDEM project team (including the translations into the national languages of the surveyed countries). Period of data collection: April-May 2024.

In this webinar, Prof. Welzel will present the key findings of the working paper "Cultural background of European democracies: examining the role of values and social inequalities " prepared within WP4. In this report, the authors examine the role of social values and inequalities for the development of institutional trust. Focusing on the four largest national populations from the EU's Western core, Nordic region, Mediterranean South, and post-communist East as exemplifications, the authors examine whether these national publics' middle class spectrum experienced polarizing ideological shifts on four key value dimensions (right-vs-left on economic issues, nativism-vs-cosmopolitanism on immigration issues, patriarchy-vs-emancipation on sexuality issues, economy-vs-environment on the sustainability issue). 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. 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. The paper is co-authored with Agnieszka Turska-Kawa (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland), Lennart Brunkert (Leuphana University Luneburg, Germany), and Bi Puranen (Bikupan Research Institute, Sweden). Project director, Prof. Christian Haerpfer (University of Vienna, Austria) will moderate the discussion.

In this workshop, TRUEDEM project participants and invited speakers discussed the issues of political trust in Eastern Europe, region sometimes described as having the "legacy of mistrust". The aim of the workshop was to address the substantial and even fundamental changes regarding the socio-political and socioeconomic cleavages in European societies that have implications for political trust, including such trends as: erosion of old and emergence of new political cleavages; shift towards the axiological cleavage/s and/or cultural backlash; radicalization of political attitudes and increased polarization; strengthening of ´bad civil society´; erosion of old identities and party alignments; emergence of new social movements and political parties; decline in party membership, individualization of citizens attitudes. The workshop took place on September 8, 2023 at the Metropolitan University in Prague, Czech Republic. Both the video recording and presentations form the workshop are available.

TRUEDEM had our project panel included into the program of the 2023 European Consortium for Political Research General Conference. We discussed the matters of political trust in Europe with Christian Haerpfer (University of Vienna), Kseniya Kizilova (ICSR), Ladislav Cabada (Metropolitan University Prague), Jakub Charvat (Metropolitan University Prague),  Bogdan Mihai Radu (Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai), Anja Kolak (University of Ljubljana), Meta Novak (University of Ljubljana), Alenka Krašovec (University of Ljubljana), and Damjan Lajh (University of Ljubljana). Topics addressed in the panel included confidence in national parliaments in Europe, trust in political parties in Central European societies over time, confidence in national public institutions and international organizations in postcommunist Europe, and democratic innovations and their influence on political trust.

TRUEDEM had our project panel included into the program of the 2023 IPSA Congress of Political Science. We discussed the issues of political trust in Europe and other continents with Anu Realo (UK), Jüri Allik (Estonia), Yasmina Abouzzohour (Morocco), Michael Robbins (United States), Yevgenya Paturyan (Armenia), Sara Melkonyan, Armenia, Daniel Moreno Morales (Bolivia), Christian Haerpfer (Austria), Kseniya Kizilova (Austria), Aaron Martin (Australia). The panel explored causal links between various forms of social capital and trust on one hand, patterns and trends of social, economic and political development of communities and societies in different cultural environments on the other. In particular, papers addressing the role of social capital and trust in the pandemic management and the impact of the pandemic on trust and social capital were presented. 

Political trust has long been regarded as an important element of regime support and factor of regime stability. On the other hand, while democracies essentially rely on the consent and support of those governed, a critically engaged citizenship that is able to hold the government accountable on key issues is the prerequisite to the efficiency and durability of the democratic regime. This suggests that political trust is, in fact, a multi-facet concept: depending on if driven by rationality, blind compliance or unjustified, cynical criticism, political trust can have both positive and negative implications for the development of the political system. The multidimensionality of political trust poses a challenge to its measurement, amid the growing importance of informed, evidence-based policymaking. The aim of this webinar is 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 debates 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. Video and materials from the webinar are available HERE. 

Prof. Christian Welzel (Leuphana University Luneburg, Germany & WP4 leader in TRUEDEM) presented a seminar for Master's student on "Democratic Horizons: What Value Change Reveals About the Future of Democracy". Recent accounts of democratic backsliding are negligent about the cultural foundations of autocracy-vs-democracy. To bring culture back in, Welzel demonstrates that (1) the countries’ membership in culture zones explains some 70% of the global variation in autocracy-vs-democracy and (2) that this culture-bound variation has remained astoundingly constant over time – in spite of all the trending patterns in the global distribution of regime types over the last 120 years. Furthermore, the explanatory power of culture zones over autocracy-vs-democracy roots in the cultures’ differentiation on “authoritarian-vs-emancipative values.” Against this backdrop, lasting regime turnovers happen as a corrective response to glacially accruing regime-culture misfits – driven by generational value shifts into a pre-dominantly emancipatory direction. Consequently, the backsliding of democracies into authoritarianism is limited to societies in which emancipative values remain under-developed. Contrary to the widely cited deconsolidation-thesis, the prevalent generational profile in people’s moral orientations exhibits an almost ubiquitous ascension of emancipative values that will lend more, not less, legitimacy to democracy in the future. 

TRUEDEM kick off meeting took place on March 27-28, 2023. Project presentation by the project director Prof. Dr. Christian W. Haerpfer was followed by introduction of national research teams, two panel discussions and two keynote addresses, including by the project co-principal investigator Prof. Dr. Pippa Norris. The public project presentation and conference took place on March 27 (Monday) at Moyzes Hall, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Vajanského nábrežie 12, Bratislava, Slovakia. The working language of the conference was English; all activities on March 27 were open to the public. Videos from the kick off meeting are available HERE.

Trust is conventionally believed to have many beneficial consequences for citizens and societies - by lubricating markets, managing organizations, legitimating governments, and facilitating collective action. Any signs of its decline are, and should be, a matter of serious concern. Yet, Pippa Norris’ In Praise of Skepticism questions the prevalent assumptions underpinning modern accounts of trust and recognizes that trust has two faces. Norris unpacks the concept and advances a new four-fold typology based on the interplay of trust and trustworthiness, where trust by principals is compared with indicators of the competency, integrity, and impartiality of governments. Trustworthiness involves an informal social contract by which principals authorize agents to act on their behalf in the expectation that they will fulfill their responsibilities with competency, integrity, and impartiality, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. We should trust but verify. Skeptical judgments reflect reasonably accurate and informed predictions about agents' future actions based on their past performance and guardrails deterring dishonesty, mendacity, and corruption. Both cynical beliefs (underestimating performance) and credulous faith (over-estimating performance) involve erroneous judgements reflecting cultural biases, poor cognitive skills, and information echo chambers. Drawing on new evidence from the European Values Survey/ World Values Survey conducted in more than 100 societies around the world, Norris concludes that as well as excessive cynicism, the risks arising from too much credulous trust by citizens towards authorities are commonly underestimated