Trust, mistrust and distrust – exploring confidence in national public institutions and international organizations in postcommunist Europe

Trust in government is important in any democratic system, but it is essential in more recent democracies or those still in the process of consolidation, such as postcommunist countries of East Central Europe. In the latter, the very survival of democracy may be put into question if people do not feel that public institutions are trustworthy. Consequently, the danger of democratic backsliding increases. Many former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have constantly displayed fairly low levels of confidence in public institutions for the last three decades. At the same time, trust in the EU (and other international organizations) has sometimes been consistently higher. Based on several waves of World Values Survey data and a pan-European survey dataset collected within the project Fighting Together, Moving Apart? European Common Defence and Shared Security in an Age of Brexit and Trump, this paper explores correlations between confidence in national public institutions and international organizations in postcommunist countries. The analysis is longitudinal and includes both EU members and states located in its neighborhood. While trust in different international organizations is assessed, the emphasis is on the case of trust in the European Union. This choice is motivated by the fluctuation of trust in the EU in various postcommunist countries and the fact these fluctuations seem to be related to membership status, among others. The paper will present the first results of the HORIZON EUROPE study of ‘Trust in European Democracies – TRUEDEM’.