Trust is widely considered the glue that binds society together, spanning scales from the individual to institutional to continental. Trust has many forms, including social and political, and can be universal as well as particular. The ESS data has amassed public opinion data on numerous measures of trust that allow examination of its composition, level, and distribution, along with its sources and consequences. Its broad temporal range combined with pan-European focus enables comparative testing of hypotheses about the reach of trust. For instance, is trust in strangers a universal moral value (Uslaner 2002, 2018), how likely are forms of trust to spill over to other domains given national, cultural, or temporal contexts, and how does particularized trust relate with and potentially translate to other types of trust, including more generalized forms (Reeskens and Hooghe 2008; Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli 2018).
We invite papers on topics encompassing social and political trust that seek to describe its many realizations across the landscape as well as to compare them using innovative methods. We welcome contributions, for example, including trust in other individuals, organizations, institutions, and the social order over time and across places. Although multi-country studies are especially encouraged, single country studies with a comparative lens will also be considered. Examples include, for instance, normative and instrumental aspects of political trust such as institutional legitimacy, government performance (Levi and Stoker 2000), evaluations of how political institutions and actors fulfill their obligations to the social and political order, trust in others, trustworthiness of societies and social systems (Putnam 2000), and the relationship between diversity and social trust (Ziller 2015).
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Investigating Trust in Europe across two Decades: Measurement Challenges with Data from the ESS
Christopher Bratt
University of Kent, UK; Inland Norway University, Norway
Trust is said to be under threat in Europe. Scholars have warned that social trust will be reduced, and political trust is said to be on a downward trend. The European Social Survey (ESS) offers a unique platform to investigate these claims by studying country differences and developments across two decades. However, such comparisons of countries or over time are believed to require measurement invariance. This study undertakes the broadest investigation into measurement invariance of trust in Europe so far: metric, scalar, and approximate measurement invariance across all 39 countries and all 10 ESS rounds. It then estimates country differences and developments over time with alternative modelling strategies, aiming to answer the question whether the increasingly utilized sophisticated statistical techniques -- some requiring proprietary, closed-source software -- are necessary for testing differences across countries and developments over time. Finally, the study demonstrates that the primary methodological challenge facing cross-country comparisons in the ESS may not be the issue of measurement invariance but the validity of the measurements.
Trust in institutions and the profile of inequality
Flaviana Palmisano, Domenico Moramarco
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
This paper investigates the importance of accounting for the profile of inequality in the analysis of institutional trust. Using data from 28 European Union countries over the 2002-2018 period, results suggest that the negative association found between total income inequality and institutional trust may hide some troubling countervailing effects. Institutional trust appears to be negatively related with inequality experienced among the income poorer and individuals belonging to the middle class, but positively related with inequality experienced among richer individuals. The results resist a set of robustness checks and, most importantly, they remain stable when the level of analysis is changed from individual to country aggregate. We highlight potential limitations of exploring the impact of the income distribution’s shape on trust using - as traditionally done in the literature - a single inequality indicator: it would only capture an average effect and hide a more complex underlying nexus between income distribution and trust.
Unraveling the Influence of Socio-Economic Inequalities on Political Trust and Participation: A Test of the Relative Deprivation and Risk Aversion Theories
Matthijs Gillissen, Silke Goubin
HIVA - KU Leuven, Belgium
Inequality fundamentally shapes the democratic engagement of citizens across Europe (Goubin & Hooghe, 2020; Filetti & Janmaat, 2018). Yet, the mechanisms via which this occurs remain debated. This article scrutinizes two competing theoretical mechanisms - relative deprivation and risk aversion - to understand whether macro-level inequality deepens or dampens the influence of micro-level vulnerability on political trust and participation (Rooduijn & Burgoon, 2017). Relative deprivation theory posits that as socio-economic disparities widen, vulnerable individuals may increasingly disengage from or oppose established political institutions due to heightened feelings of systemic exclusion. Conversely, risk aversion theory suggests that the fear of exacerbating one's disadvantaged status might actually dampen opposition to these institutions. However, this line of thinking on the consequences of inequality has mostly been developed around income inequality, largely overlooking the potential impact of other forms of inequality such as those resulting from a broader socio-economic vulnerabilities.
Our analysis, utilizing 10 waves of the European Social Survey, investigates these mechanisms at both macro- and micro-levels. We examine the effects of socio-economic disparities - specifically those stemming from occupational, educational, and gender differences - on citizens' trust and participation in democratic institutions across Europe. Employing time-series cross-sectional analyses, this research is unique in its ability to distinguish between the effects of changing levels of inequalities within countries and systemic disparities between them. It also sheds light on how these disparities, both within and between social groups, shape political engagement.
The findings reveal a complex interplay between various forms of inequality and political engagement. Not all sources of socio-economic vulnerability significantly impact democratic participation or trust. However, our results consistently show that macro-level inequalities tend to amplify, rather than mitigate, the effects of individual-level socio-economic vulnerabilities on political trust and participation. This evidence predominantly supports the relative deprivation theory in the context of broader socio-economic forms of inequality, while offering little backing for the risk aversion hypothesis. In conclusion, this study broadens the understanding of non-economic inequalities in shaping political dynamics and discusses the implications for contemporary social welfare policies aimed at mitigating the deepening negative impact of inequality.
Media Coverage and Its Influence on State Trust: Exploring Mechanisms and Implications in the German Context
Julia Sophia Schmid1, Hendrik Theine2
1University of Hohenheim, Germany; 2Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Trust in the state is a key element of a well-functioning society and relevant to solve collective action problems. In this contribution, we argue that individuals’ trust towards the national state is influenced by media coverage. Empirically, we study the influence of state-related media coverage on individuals’ state trust in the context of Germany, based on the European Social Survey (ESS) and a dataset of state-related media coverage within the observation period of September 2018 until March 2019. We estimate three mechanisms to show that media coverage has a negative effect on state trust. First, the volume effect that shows that the sheer quantity of media coverage to which individuals are exposed to matters. Second, the tonality effect, which focuses on the sentiment and emotional tone conveyed in media coverage. Third, the topic effect that uncovers the specific focus emphasized in media coverage. Our analysis places a particular emphasis on the third mechanism, which explores how the actual content of media coverage moulds people's perceptions of trust in the state and which is a noteworthy methodological contribution of our paper. Our approach to explore three different mechanisms how media coverage influences state trust sheds light on the nuanced ways in which media shapes public opinion and trust in the state.
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