Interpersonal trust rates declined in many states during the European Financial and Migration Crises. Former research conducted on political movements in times of crises revealed a connection between strong populist groups and low levels of political trust (Algan et al. 2017; Fieschi & Heywood 2004). Therefore, research on the development of trust is of high relevance considering the current rise of populist parties all over Europe. By studying political trust as a dependent construct, we want to shed light on the question if the crises hitting the European Union during the last decade had a sustainable effect on public trust rates. To that end, our statistical analyses focus on Germany. During the past years, many comparative studies on the development of various forms of trust have been published (Foster & Frieden 2017; Van Erkel & van der Meer 2016). However, no study to date analyzed the case of Germany in-depth. We think that the German case is of special interest for various reasons. Firstly, some regions were more hit by economic downturn during the Euro Crisis than others. Secondly, regions located on the border to Austria experienced particularly high influx rates of asylum seekers during the Migration Crisis in 2015. We assume that low levels of trust in national and European institutions correlate with the level of crises consternation. By employing regional data of the European Social Survey from 2008 to 2016 we are able to obtain information on the development of trust rates in Germany, otherwise lost in the national level. To answer our research question, multilevel logistic regression analyses are conducted. Moreover, the impact of political events on trust rates is measured via a quasi- experimental design. Our statistical models control for the effect of political events within the time period of the Euro and the Migration Crises.
