Trust in political parties in Central European societies, 2004-2023

Political parties are considered to be one of the most important components and actors ensuring the transmission of demands and general communication between the society and political institutions. Thus, the regular and legitimate functioning of political parties presents a key precondition for the stability of democratic system and trust in democracy in general. However, citizens increasingly perceive parties as elite-driven and unrepresentative of the broader public and generally untrustworthy. In our research, we focus on the key factors and indicators determining and illustrating the transformation of trust in political parties in Central Europe over the last two decades. For the analysis, we selected 6 nations that are commonly included in the Central European framework – next to the Visegrad Group nations also Slovenia and Austria. With the exception of the latter, our sample comprises from the so-called new EU-member states. Nevertheless, there exist plethora of legacies bringing also Austria closer to the region. The year 2004 was chosen as the starting point for our analysis from two reasons – firstly, the so-called post-Communist nations in the region joined the EU and completed the most important period of Europeanization; and second, since the late 2000s, political science has been discussing a set of crises and the presumed impact and linkage of this polycrisis with the so-called earthquake elections in the region and the ongoing dismantling of pre-crisis party systems. Thus, next to the explicitly declared (dis-)trust into the political parties scrutinized by Eurobarometer and other datasets, we also focus on the broader aspects such as the party membership development, extra-system electoral volatility, anti-party sentiment and the emergence and success of anti-party and/or populist parties, new forms of political participation etc. The paper will present the first results of the HORIZON EUROPE study of ‘Trust in European Democracies – TRUEDEM’