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Educational Performance and Political Trust in Europe

Political Psychology
Quantitative
Public Opinion
Bilal Hassan
Universitetet i Bergen
Bilal Hassan
Universitetet i Bergen

Abstract

This paper will study the association between students’ assessment of their educational institutions and political trust in Europe. Theoretically, it will draw insights from two independent yet quite relevant streams of literature: theory of procedural justice and micro-performance theory. A common assumption of these two theoretical traditions is that an agency’s micro-performance matters in producing institutional trust. By converging these two streams, this paper would demonstrate that beyond the sufficient supply of their expected public services, citizens would expect civil servants to exhibit procedural fairness and distributive justice. Some studies have found positive associations between macro-level measures of performance of educational institutions, for example, state of education in the country, political satisfaction. Nevertheless, there is an acute shortage of empirical literature that locates the origin of political trust in the micro-evaluation of the educational institutions by the students. This paper enters as a scholarly enterprise to understand the political malaise effects of micro aspects of the educational institutions by mobilizing the micro-performance theory, the 2004 European Social Survey data, and multilevel regression analyses. An additive index of institutional trust would serve as the key dependent variable. The effectiveness of the educational institutions in training students according to their career aspirations, fair treatment, and getting assistance from the teacher would be the candidate independent variables. Moreover, a host of individual-level and country-level variables would be entered into the multilevel regression equations. My key expectation is that students’ positive assessment of their educational institutions would have positive effects on political trust across Europe. Keywords: Political trust, micro-performance theory, fair treatment, and multilevel analysis.