Political Trust in Times of Crises: a Cohort Analysis of 25 EU Countries from 2005-2024

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Europe has grappled with a series of crises, from the 2008 financial and sovereign debt crises to the 2015 refugee crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, and most recently, the Ukrainian refugee crisis, testing political trust within EU’s multilevel governance system. While existing trust literature primarily focuses on individual level and single-crisis scenarios, it rarely examines or compares how birth cohorts socialized in different times, with distinct priorities and values, adjust their trust when different types of crises hit. To address this gap, this paper adopts a cohort perspective to investigate the impact of the four major crises from 2005 to 2024 on political trust at both national and EU levels. Drawing on political socialization theories and crisis-related literature, the paper anticipates divergent responses to crises across birth cohorts. Analyzing 39 waves from Standard Eurobarometer surveys from 25 EU countries via a pooled APC and pseudo-panel models reveals distinct generational patterns during crises. Substantively, preliminary findings indicate that economic crises are the most systematic and cumulative source of trust erosion within EU’s multilevel governance, with negative effects manifesting more at the national than the EU level, and the resulting loss of political trust surpassing that of subsequent crises in both persistence and depth. Cohort analysis further suggests that younger generations tend to be more sensitive and vulnerable to economic and pandemic crises, while showing greater resilience than older cohorts during refugee crises. Taken together, this multi-crisis and cohort-based analysis helps assess whether and to what extent societal, especially political, responses to various large-scale exogenous shocks are universal. This knowledge is of high policy-relevance, as it can inform crisis communication and response strategies, including by aligning messages with the attribution logics that different cohorts may apply in different types of crises.