The Impact of Political Trust and Political Capital upon Political Participation in Central and Eastern Europe

This paper is presenting an analysis of the impact and influence of political trust and political capital upon political participation in Central and Eastern Europe. It is studying how conventional and unconventional political participation is influenced by political capital on the one hand and trust in democracy, trust in government, trust in parliament, trust in political parties, trust in the legal system, trust in media, trust in European Union etc. on the other. The study is comparing the influence of political trust in political participation and satisfaction with democracy and political capital upon political citizen's participation in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The quantitative data-base of this paper is the ‘TRUEDEM-Survey’, which was conducted by both authors in Summer 2025 in 24 member-states of the European Union with 30 000 interviews.