The Interplay of Social and Political Trust in Europe: Cross-Country Patterns and Over-Time Trends

Political trust is widely associated with a number of positive outcomes in representative democracies (van der Meer 2017; van der Meer and Zmerli 2017). Political trust drives citizens’ interest and engagement in politics, increases voting turnout and makes law-abiding behaviour more common (Putnam 1993). The two major theoretical approaches explaining political trust differentiate between “bottom-up” cultural theories stressing the role of social capital, social cohesion, common values, and shared beliefs serving as the key components of civic culture and major sources of political trust and regime support on one side (Putnam 1993, 2000), and the “top-down” institutional perspective where political trust is regarded as the expected utility of satisfactory economic and political performance of the institutions, on the other (Coleman 1990; Dasgupta 1988; Hetherington 1998). This paper uses empirical evidence from the Eurobarometer, European Social Survey, European Values Study and the World Values Survey for 1990 to 2020 to examine the cross-country variation, regional patterns, and over-time trends of social (generalized) and political (confidence in public institutions) trust in EU member-states. In the second part of our analysis, we examine and compare the effect of social trust as well as institutional performance indicators as the predictors of political trust across the EU. Macro-economic indicators, media environment, and postmaterialist values are introduced as control variables. The paper will present the first results of the HORIZON EUROPE study of ‘Trust in European Democracies – TRUEDEM’.