All time references are in CEST
Measuring and analyzing trust in institutions |
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| Session Organiser | Ms Maud Reveilhac (Lausanne University) |
| Time | Thursday 20 July, 16:00 - 17:30 |
| Room | U6-05 |
This session raises several core questions related to trust in political institutions and aims to advance our knowledge of how to gauge and evaluate political trust. The session starts by focusing on the definition and key components of political trust. Indeed, despite the vast number of studies on political trust, the notion is still regarded as ambiguous, thus making it difficult to define and investigate. More longitudinal and cross-sectional research is therefore required to examine the validity and robustness of measures of trust, not only in different cultural contexts but also over time. Following that, the session seeks to clarify what the general public expects from and understands about the fundamental elements of political trust. In particular, it looks at how the general public feels about transparency policies, which are put in place in response to a general decline in public confidence in political institutions across the world. Comparative research demonstrates both cross-country and within-country variations that scholars and policymakers should consider in order to increase and maintain higher levels of trust in political institutions. This session further discusses the effects of particular factors on political trust and does so for different subgroups of the population that exhibit significant differences in terms of, among others, social capital, socioeconomic status, societal views and expectations, as well as levels of political interest. The papers presented in this session pay particular attention to the effects of media consumption and experiences of discrimination on trust in political institutions. Overall, the session also emphasizes the effect of contextual factors, such as crisis situations (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic and economic indicators) and political systems, on citizens’ assessments of policy performance and, consequently, trust in political institutions.
Keywords: trust in institutions, political trust
Dr Giuseppe Carteny (MZES - University of Mannheim) - Presenting Author
Institutional confidence, also known as institutional trust, is a form of political support (Easton 1965, 1975) encompassing evaluations about regime legitimacy, institution and authority performance, as well as other expectations and evaluations. One of the most heated discussions about the empirical investigation of individuals’ confidence in institutions concerns its measurement (Bauer Freitag 2017) and its dimensionality (Fisher et al. 2010, 2011; Hooghe 2011; Schnaudt 2019). Yet, despite a long-lasting discussion about its nature, empirical analyses of political confidence have mostly been based on a “kitchen-sink” approach – namely a theory-driven aggregation of different measures of individual confidence. Furthermore, political confidence students have seldom dealt with the challenge deriving from the assessment of political confidence measurement equivalence across space and time, and the relatively few studies addressing this topic are limited in their scope (Marien 2011; Schneider 2016; Breustedt 2017). This work aims to fill this gap by providing a longitudinal, cross-cultural empirical analysis of political confidence dimensionality and its measurement (in)equivalence, based on the data of different multi-purpose survey projects, such as the World and European Value Survey (WVS, EVS) and the Global Barometer Surveys (GBS).
Dr Mujtaba Ali Isani (German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM)) - Presenting Author
Regardless of their individual backgrounds, Muslims across Europe face marginalization and exclusion based on being seen as an out-group with a different culture, religion, or race as well as restrictions in accessing economic and political opportunities. While previous research has shown European Muslims to be more trusting toward European institutions than other groups, we hypothesize that experiencing discrimination from the host society should reduce European Muslims’ trust in domestic institutions. Experiencing discrimination might make them more skeptical of the political context they are living in and the political institutions of this context which are seemingly unable to prevent or protect them from discrimination. To test the hypotheses, the paper uses pooled data from the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2018 and, the National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa) Panel data from Germany, which includes questions on trust in institutions as well as experiences of discrimination. The preliminary results show that feelings of discrimination are negatively and significantly related to trust in domestic political institutions like the police, judiciary and the national parliament. The results evidence that long-term integration – that also reaches out to identity- and discrimination-related problems of immigrants – is strongly needed to sustain higher levels of institutional trust.
Ms Maud Reveilhac (Lausanne University) - Presenting Author
Professor Hajo Boomgaarden (Vienna University)
Previous research argued that media coverage influences public opinion about the perceived importance and knowledge about policy issues (Zaller, 1992; Eveland & Scheufele, 2000; McCombs, 2005; de Vreese & Boomgaarden, 2006; Boomgaarden & Vliegenthart, 2009). Studying relationships between media coverage and public opinion require linking data from (panel- or cross-sectional) surveys to aggregate features of media coverage (e.g., frames or tonality). Linking both data sources is paramount in times of crisis to have a fuller picture of the trends in public attitudes, especially because news content plays an essential role in citizens’ opinion formation in such difficult times.
This study considers whether news coverage of the Austrian government influences dynamics in public trust towards the government in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Austria represents an important study case as levels of public trust have displayed unprecedented drops over the pandemic and because the media landscape has also come under criticisms. More concretely, the proposed study relies on 30 waves of the Austrian Corona Panel survey and are linked to news coverage from March 2020 to June 2022, which represent an exceptional long observation window.
The strength of the effect of the news is discussed in comparison to the effect of contextual explanatory variables (e.g., Covid-19 cases and economic indicators), as well as individual attitudes (e.g., health and economic risk perceptions, health status, political positioning, satisfaction towards democracy workings and governmental outcomes). In addition to multivariate analysis, the proposed study also aims to encourage transparency and replicability by providing a dynamic dashboard including all the variables used for conducting the research and a detailed discussion about the encountered data integration challenges.
Dr Edward Freeland (Princeton University) - Presenting Author
Ms Marion Mattos (Grenoble School of Political Studies)
Recent research has shown that transparency is a key component of citizens’ trust in government. This study looks more closely at transparency and how it is related to people’s overall trust in government. The purpose is to study perceptions associated with long-terms declines in trust in government in many western nations. For this study, we look at new survey data use based on representative samples from four European countries (Finland, Germany, France, and Hungary) that vary in government transparency and in citizens’ levels of trust toward their national governments. A conjoint analysis is used (1) to evaluate which among a variety of policies for increasing for transparency are considered most beneficial and most effective, and (2) to examine the extent to which those methods deemed most effective are likely to increase trust in government. Data from the survey show that methods deemed most effective for improving transparency and trust vary across countries and also within countries by key demographic characteristics such as age, gender and education.