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This WP aims to implement a comprehensive analysis of the information environment in the societies across the EU to assess the openness of information flows (monitored by proxy measures of freedom of expression) which serves an important mediator of trustworthiness assessment and hence trust-building. The public’s judgments of trustworthiness are likely to be more accurate in open democratic societies, characterized by legislative oversight of the executive and courts, investigative journalistic watchdogs, and independent oversight agencies monitoring maladministration and malpractices by state and local authorities.
WP Leader: Prof. Pippa Norris, ICSR, Austria and Harvard University, USA.
WORK PLAN AND DELIVERABLES
Task 7.1. Setting up the methodological frame.
Societies with one-sided information flows (in closed information societies like China) display greater trust in political authorities than those living in contexts with two-sided information flows (like Sweden). The free press is commonly regarded as an essential condition for an enlightened public. Thus, more informed decisions about trustworthy political leaders, political parties, civil service officials, and state authorities are likely to be maximized in open societies with freedom of expression, media pluralism, and accountability mechanisms, all closely associated with the type of democratic or autocratic regime governing each state, combined with levels of human development, expanding literacy, schooling, and media access in each society. Some of the most troubling indications of democratic backsliding in recent decades concern increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and civil liberties, including through state censorship of the independent media, unofficial government harassment of critical journalists, and expanded libel or defamation laws, illustrated in cases such as Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. The first WP deliverable, the framework paper, will use secondary population (EVS/ WVS, ESS, ISSP etc.) and expert (Freedom House, V-Dem etc.) survey data to provide a comparative cross-country overview of media use patterns and information environments in European and selected world countries to examine the causal links between the media and information environment, on our side, and the types of trust widespread in the society, including rational skeptical vs credulous trust and cynical mistrust.
Task 7.2. Design of the online survey module with split samples.
Report D7.2 is a methodological paper that discusses how TRUEDEM project measures political trust and perceived trustworthiness in survey-embedded experiments across 24 European countries. The paper motivates the rational of experimental measurement by diagnosing the limits of single close-ended trust items, including problems such as construct validity, aggregation, and comparability. When citizens report to “trust” or “distrust”, they are rarely responding to a single uniform idea. People judge whether politicians can do the job, whether they are following the rules, whether they act in the interest of citizens and treat them equally, among the many other criteria. Conventional survey items often compress these perceptions into one single response. Survey experiments allow to analyse the nuances of political trust and perceptions of trustworthiness. Analysis of two TRUEDEM split-sample experiments comprises the empirical core of the paper. The list item count experiment on trust in national leaders is employed to assess the response bias – whether citizens, under the influence of norms of public expression or other factors, have a tendency to over-state or under-report trust in the national Head of Government. The findings show that direct trust question in many national contexts across Europe can be inflated by prevailing civic norms and social desirability. Over-reporting of political trust is more common among those with higher education and middle-aged respondents. The second experiment is a single-step vignette that tests the marginal contribution of competence, integrity, impartiality, or authenticity cues to the perceptions of trustworthiness. The findings suggest that citizens primarily reward signals of capacity; impartiality proves greater significance in Central and Eastern Europe, and integrity – in Nordic and Baltic states. The results also reveal heterogeneity by age and education. On average, all vignettes have a greater effect on trustworthiness assessment among the senior respondents, and the smallest – among the youngest. Similar is the association between predicted trustworthiness and education levels, with the effect being particularly pronounced for Competence and Integrity, which have the greatest effect among those with tertiary education.
Task 7.3. Media Freedom, Information Regulation, and Political Trust in the EU
An extensive strand of literature demonstrates that citizen evaluations of political institution that serve as the foundation for political trust judgments are frequently formed based on mediated political information obtained from news media channels. Despite the richness of the literature, two conceptual limitations persist. First, many studies operationalize media influence as a direct relationship between exposure to specific media sources and trust. Second, political trust itself is often operationalized as a unidimensional outcome – an aggregated index of confidence in political institutions. The present study addresses these gaps by proposing an integrated, multi-stage heuristic model of media influence on political trust. On the predictor side, we distinguish between media consumption patterns that capture structural conditions under which information reaches the users, and media-related attitudes that determine how incoming information is evaluated and processed. On the outcome side, the report differentiates between political trust and perceptions of trustworthiness. Finally, the analysis moves focus from the influence of media on political trust level to the normative interpretation and foundations that underly the political trust judgement. Our findings reveal that trust in media and perceived impartiality of media emerge as consistent positive predictors of competence, integrity and impartiality. Longer exposure to political news is positively associated with competence but decreases perceived impartiality. Use of social media is positively associated with competence and integrity, but negatively with impartiality. At the macro level, press freedom strengthens evaluations of integrity and impartiality, but does not affect competence, suggesting that institutional fairness and accountability, rather than performance capacity, are more sensitive to the quality of media environment. The introduced residual-based typology of political trust judgements demonstrates that media influence not only how much citizens trust, but how that trust is related to the actual institutional performance. Traditional media use increases the probability of compliant trust and reduces cynical trust type, but, with the exception of television, shows no association with sceptical type. Duration of exposure increases the likelihood of sceptical trust and reduces cynical type. Reliance on multiple information sources strengthens cynicism and undermines sceptical and complaint trust. Trust in media and media impartiality strengthen compliant trust and reduce cynical mistrust. Sceptical trust, however, is not generated through “spillover” effect from social trust, neither it is built on confidence in media as a heuristic shortcut. Instead, it relies more heavily on individual cognitive resources and sustained information exposure, which results in more balanced, sceptical assessment of political actors and institutions.
Task 7.4. Key Drivers of Trust and Trustworthiness in the European Union: Cross-National Patterns and Country-Specific Distinctions.
In the present report, we develop, operationalize and test an evaluative model of political trust in which citizens’ trust judgments are interpreted as the outcome of evaluation of trustworthiness and policy performance of political actors and institutions. Rather than being treated as an inherited social or cultural disposition or as a measure of diffuse regime support detached from everyday political life, within our approach political trust is conceptualized as evaluative judgement rooted in public assessments of procedural and output trustworthiness of the political authorities. The model assumes that objective manifestations of the institutional performance, operationalized through macroeconomic, political and developmental indicators, provide information cues (stage 1), which citizens use to judge about the trustworthiness of institutions (stage 2). The model features two important clusters of mediating conditions: media environment, that influences which types of information cues and their volume that reach the citizens, and individual level cognitive skills and political predispositions that shape the variation in processing of the information and influence what type of information cues are actually employed to develop the trust judgement (stage 3), and which are disregarded. The report therefore attempts to move beyond standard performance theories by disentangling the “black box” between institutional performance on one hand and political trust on the other. Our analysis demonstrates that not only actual objective performance of institutions matters for public trust, but also how this performance becomes visible, how it is interpreted, and through which predispositional filters it is benchmarked and judged.
The first group of findings show that political trust in the European Union is foremost shaped by citizens’ evaluations of core representative institutions and assessment of public policy outputs. The strongest predictors of political trust are the perceived trustworthiness of the national government and the national parliament, together with citizens’ assessments of policy outs. This finding suggests that political trust is less anchored in diffuse regime attachment and more in specific evaluations of governing institutions, and whether they function properly and deliver. Procedural trustworthiness evaluations also matter, however, association between citizens generalized evaluations of competence, integrity and impartiality and political trust is more differentiated. The empirical results therefore support the claim that trust is grounded in an evaluative process. At the same time, the findings also show that mediating conditions of trustworthiness evaluations matter because they shape how these evaluations are formed, reinforced, or distorted. Among them, the strongest and most consequential are political predispositions and cognitive resources: partisan alignment (winner–loser effect), followed by conspiracy beliefs, interest in politics, generalized social trust, and tertiary education. Conspiracy beliefs undermine political trust by framing political events and outcomes as products of hidden agendas and narrow elite interests, thereby eroding perceived institutional integrity and willingness to accept official political accounts as credible. Interest in politics, by contrast, is associated with greater attention to public affairs and more sustained political engagement, and in the pooled model retains a positive association with political trust. Generalized social trust also remains an important positive covariate across a considerable number of countries, consistent with the idea of a “spillover effect” whereby citizens who have good faith in other people are more inclined to extend positive expectations to political institutions. Tertiary education is also positively associated with political trust, suggesting that higher education can strengthen the cognitive resources needed to recognize institutional performance signals, process political information, and form more differentiated trust judgments.
Smaller but still significant effects are observed for populist attitudes, authoritarian attitudes, income and civic knowledge. Populist attitudes undermine political trust by activating anti-elite interpretive frames through which representative institutions are seen as self-centred. Authoritarian attitudes, by contrast, are positively associated with political trust as they are linked to greater deference to authority and a stronger preference for order and hierarchy. Civic knowledge is also positively associated with political trust through its role as a cognitive resource: it strengthens citizens’ capacity to recognize institutional competence, process performance signals, and translate political information into more consistent trust judgments. By contrast, the majority of media consumption patterns matter more modestly and unevenly. Traditional news sources and greater exposure to political news are associated with somewhat higher political trust, while social media use demonstrates a negative association with political trust. The most prominent media-related predictors are use of television news and duration of exposure to political news. Both point in the same direction: more frequent contact with professional political news appears to strengthen trust rather than erode it. Overall, the media consumption pattern is more consistent with the virtuous circle thesis, suggesting that greater and more regular exposure to traditional news media is positively associated with political trust.
The comparative analysis of country models further indicates that some predictors are more universal in character, while others are more strongly shaped by national context. Perceptions of government and parliament trustworthiness emerge as the strongest predictor across many national models. Our analysis identifies three clusters of countries. First, an executive-centred cluster, where the trustworthiness of the national government has a much stronger association with political thrust that the trustworthiness of the parliament. This pattern is especially pronounced in Lithuania, Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, and Estonia. Second, a dual-anchored cluster, where trustworthiness of the government and parliament matter almost equally for political trust. This pattern is observed in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Slovenia. Finally, third, a legislative-centred cluster, where the trustworthiness of parliament is more important than the trustworthiness of government. This pattern appears present in Bulgaria, Finland, Romania, and Spain. Partisan alignment emerged as another important predictor of political trust salient across the majority of studied countries. Three clusters of countries were identified based on “winner-loser” effects dynamic on political trust. First, an asymmetric winner-dominant configuration appears in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. In this group, electoral winners display significantly higher political trust, while electoral losers do not differ significantly from the politically unaligned. Second, a balanced winner–loser configuration is found in Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. Here, both winners and losers exhibit political trust levels that are comparatively similar to each other, and both are higher than those of politically unaligned citizens. Third, a weak or non-significant electoral-status configuration was found in Estonia, Portugal, and the Netherlands, where partisan alignment matters little overall.
Several other mediating conditions generally demonstrate universal or near-universal effect on political trust. First, social capital (generalized trust) emerges as an important positive covariate of political trust in a considerable number of societies, reflecting the extent to which confidence in political institutions remains connected to broader interpersonal orientations of reciprocity. Second, conspiracy beliefs index which is negatively associated with political trust in vast majority of studied countries and retains its statistical significance across majority of national models, thus making it one of the most stable and substantively important negative mediating conditions.
A number of mediating conditions, by contrast, mainly exhibit context-specific effects. Only a minority of countries demonstrate a robust positive association between tertiary education and political trust, namely Czechia, France, Ireland, Italy, and Romania. Civic knowledge index, which captures respondents’ factual understanding of political institutions and processes, is positively and statistically significantly associated with political trust in selected countries only, namely Austria, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, and Latvia. Likewise, authoritarian attitudes emerge as predictor of political trust in a handful of countries, including Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, and Romania, while populist attitudes matter only in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Hungary, with the dominant pattern being negative and Hungary standing out as the exception. An important mediating condition cluster is represented by media consumption variables, yet these display only modest and context-dependent associations with political trust. Most universal is use of television. The overall duration of exposure to political news also shows positive significance across limited number of countries.
In the final section of our analysis, we introduce residual-based typology of political trust judgements to examine the how mediating conditions influence not only how much citizens trust, but how that trust is related to the actual institutional performance. Our analysis differentiates between three types of trust judgements, depending on the alignment between the objective institutional performance indicators (economic growth, control of corruption, liberal democracy, quality of governance) and the reported individual political trust: skeptical (aligned); compliant (over-trusting); cynical trust (under-trusting). Our findings suggest that individual predispositions and media shape distinct patterns across the three political trust judgement types. Compliant trust judgment is strongly associated with positive predispositions toward political authority and the society more broadly. Several factors consistently increase the likelihood of compliant trust, including generalized social trust, authoritarian attitudes, and party alignment with the incumbents. In terms of media consumption, compliant trust is associated with greater engagement with traditional media and greater political news exposure. Overall, compliant trust emerges from a combination of institutionally supportive predispositions, interpersonal trust, and high exposure to political information. Cynical mistrust displays the mirrored pattern of compliant trust. Citizens exhibiting cynical mistrust are characterized by strong anti-institutional predispositions and distrustful orientations, including foremost conspiracy mentality, populist orientations, and little social trust. Media consumption patterns also differ: traditional media generally reduce cynical mistrust, social media consumption exhibits a positive association with cynical mistrust. Finally, sceptical trust represents a distinct type of trust judgment that differs from both compliant trust and cynical mistrust. Sceptical trust appears to be associated with greater cognitive engagement and critical evaluation, including civic knowledge, resistance to conspiracy theories and populist narratives. Media consumption patterns further reinforce this interpretation. Sceptical mistrust is associated with greater exposure to political news, greater consumption of television news and lower reliance on online news websites.
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