Populist agents and patterns of contestation trust in science

The paper seeks to contribute to scholarship on populist discourse and populist rhetoric by focusing on the issue of populist agents’ (dis)trust in science, scientists and professionals, as well as scientifically developed solutions. Authors employ a dataset of trust-contestations during the covid-19 pandemic, based on the content analysis of journals in seven European countries (N=5617), created within EnTrust research project to analyse how populist agents attribute (dis)trust to science, health professionals and medical experts and vaccines. More specifically, authors strive to find whether such agents as Polish, Czech, Serbian government representatives and members of populist parties in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Greece display a systemic pattern of advocacy (not) to trust science and how their political claims (not) to trust science differ from the claims of non-populist political agents in the mentioned seven countries.