In democratic regimes, citizens’ decisions in the process of delegating power are made under conditions of uncertainty about motivations and future actions of political-institution leaders. Trust in state institutions is therefore one of the key principles providing sustainability and legitimacy of political systems. The objective of this paper is to solve a puzzling, well confirmed empirical result: In some European countries average trust in public institutions clearly diverges from the relationship typical for democratic countries with market economies. According to the theory-stipulated pattern, trust should be positively related to the level of a country’s democratization. However, in some European countries trust in institutions and the quality of democracy seem to be inversely proportional, which has caused, and still causes interpretational difficulties. These difficulties are due to theoretical and methodological issues. To date, comparative empirical studies dealing with trust in institutions usually focused on Western countries with stable democracies and high levels of economic development, limiting the scope of theoretically-relevant variables. The hereby proposed hypothesis is that in some countries there exist specific configurations (interactions) of cultural and structural factors, which distort the relation “democracy-trust”. The effects of these factors will be established with a mixed methodology, combining quantitative methods (multi-level modeling) and qualitative (contextual document analysis), overcoming the deficiencies of simplified linear regression models applied to the two-level data. In this paper analyses are based on the data provided by the European Values Study, in addition to political, economic and cultural variables as contextual data. Studying relations between trust and the influence of social, economic and cultural factors provides better understanding of mechanisms that lead to the generation of trust, and of favorable circumstances. Results of this analysis will contribute to the knowledge of the concept of trust, as well as improve the understanding of trust in specific contexts.
