Different Levels of Governance, Different Levels of Trust? A Multi-Level Governance Perspective on Trust Trends 2004–2020

Political trust is held to be a cornerstone of functioning democracies that facilitates cooperation, fosters political engagement, and ultimately reflects institutional legitimacy. As a consequence, political science has long focused on documenting and analyzing trends in political trust, with some researchers expressing concern about the purported decreasing levels of trust in advanced democracies in recent decades. At the same time, the institutional makeup of those countries has changed considerably with the deepening of EU integration. This process has often been described as multi-level governance to denote the sharing of political authority between the local, national, and EU levels. In this context, this paper aims to provide an in-depth investigation of the evolution of political trust across those three levels of governance in EU member countries. We are primarily interested in how trends and patterns across countries vary by level of governance. To that end, we harmonize a series of Eurobarometer studies from 2004 to 2020 and construct a merged dataset. Our analysis is based on country-level mean comparisons of the cross-sectional time-series data set. Our findings reveal distinct country groups with similar trajectories of trust at each governance level, alongside significant divergences in trust trends between local, national, and EU institutions. These results highlight the complex interplay between governance levels and trust, offering a nuanced perspective on institutional legitimacy across multi-level systems. By adopting a multi-level governance framework, this study provides fresh insights into the dynamics of political trust in the European Union and its member states.