Local Autonomy, Regional Authority, and Trust in Multilevel Institution: A Multilevel Study of 31 European Nations

Trust in local, regional, national, and supranational institutions, as well as their structures, functions, and performance evaluations, are the focus of current research. Despite a few studies that have investigated the relationship between the latter and former aspects of multilevel institutions, it remains an open question that requires a new investigation from the spillover hypothesis and through the lens of local autonomy and regional authority. From the perspective of bottom-up spillover, local autonomy will increase trust in local institutions, which will then spread national institutions. Trust in local institutions will be higher than trust in national institutions because the former is closer to the citizens than the latter. However, the difference between local and national trust becomes larger when local governments have more autonomy, which enables citizens to have more influence on the design and delivery of local public services. Greater regional autonomy and trust in regional authorities will move together based on the same logic. Recent rounds of the Eurobarometer and European Social Survey contain a battery of questions regarding trust in the local, regional, and national governments of the 31 European nations. These individual-level data will be merged with indices of local autonomy and regional authority to produce multilevel data in which individual-level observations will be nested in the local, regional, and national contexts. The data will be analyzed through multilevel analysis.