Political trust research and trends

TRUEDEM aims to build a robust and comprehensive knowledge base on the long-term developments for both trust in political institutions of representative democracy (political parties, executives, parliaments, judiciary) and trust in supranational institutions that play an increasingly important role with respect to democracy at the national and international levels (the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization etc.). Available secondary data will be collected, harmonized, documented through the addition of metadata, and integrated into a dataset that will serve as input data for other WPs in the project and will be distributed to the public. The data will also act as background for developing a European Observatory on Political Trust, an online network of scholars, public opinion researchers, civil society leaders, policymakers with the aim of constantly updating and presenting to the European public the latest data on political trust - as well as providing and discussing the various accounts explaining the observed trends. 

Literature review of sources listed in Scopus and Web of Science, conducted by UoB-RO, indicated a great increase of a number of publication on trust in 2018-2022. Cooperation in the field of trust research was intensifying, with the number of publications co-authored by 3-5 colleagues growing from 30% in 2000s to a half since 2020. Conducted analysis identified 19265 publications on trust (after several steps of cleaning) published in almost 5000 journals; 12% of all articles were published in top 25 journals by top 10 publishers (Elsevier, Routledge, Sage, Wiley, Springer among the others). Articles published in the main journals in Social Sciences have a higher average number of pages (Social Indicators Research – 22 pages; Journal of Trust Research – 22 pages; Political Studies – 21 pages; Political Behavior – 23 pages) while journals from other disciplines publish shorter articles (Social Sciences and Medicine – 10 pages; Journal of Business Research – 10 pages; Computers in Human Behavior – 11 pages; Personality and Individual Differences – 7 pages). The analysis also allowed to identify 6 main thematic clusters in trust research literature: institutional trust (political science); consumer trust (marketing); social capital and trust (sociology); technology, AI and trust (IT sphere); trust in healthcare and medical domain (health sciences); intra-organizational trust (management). In publications that rely on population survey data in social sciences, the most widely used datasets are European Values Study/ World Values Survey (27%); European Social Survey (22%); General Social Survey (15%). The most analyzed geographical regions are China (13%); USA (12%); world as a whole (12%); Europe (8%).  

In this section of the study, we comparatively mapped the variation of the publics’ trust/confidence in five political institutions, the government/politicians, political parties, the national parliament, the courts/legal system, and the police before and after the economic crisis, as well as during and after the current coronavirus crisis. The analysis was based on the 2008-2022 available information mainly from the ESS, the Eurobarometer and the WVS/EVS for the following 30 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the UK. The results were presented for the higher levels of political trust/confidence in all five political institutions under consideration at country level overtime and cross-nationally and overtime by political institutions. The cross-national analysis showed that in affluent EU countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, UK, The Netherlands, and to some extent Luxemburg) there has been no decline in political trust during the 2008-2012 period. This is so probably because they remained largely unaffected by the economic crisis. However, no decline in political trust was observed in less affluent EU countries like Latvia and Lithuania, which might mean that political trust is not causally related to GDP. In many EU countries the decline of political trust incurred during the period of the economic crisis was rectified after a couple of years. The rally round the flag effect sprung after the eruption of the pandemic and faded any soon later – an assumption laying behind many analyses of the social responses to the health crisis-, is not detected in some TRUEDEM countries, irrespective of their economic level. These countries are Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Switzerland. This implies that the rally round the flag effect is not necessarily a transient phenomenon. Fluctuations in political trust reflect and at the same time mediate macro-, meso- and micro-level political cultural and political structural dynamics specific to each EU country.