On 8 October, prof. dr. Marc Verboord presented at the Horizon TRUEDEM webinar series. This series brings together state-of-the-art research on political and institutional trust. Verboord is Professor of Media and Society at Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication.
The TRUEDEM webinar series is organised by TRUEDEM: Trust in European Democracies, a project funded by the European Union's Horizon programme for research and innovation. Principal investigators are Prof. Christian Haerpfer (Chair of the World Value Survey Association) and Prof. Pippa Norris. The presentation reported on results from a research paper in the INVENT project, co-written with Susanne Janssen, Nete Norgaard Kristensen, and Franziska Marquart, which shows how cultural backlash indicators and media use affect institutional trust in nine European countries.
The trust that citizens place in institutions such as national government, the EU, news media and science is influenced, on the one hand, by evaluations of how institutions perform (positive means more trust), and, on the other hand, by sociocultural values that citizens hold (more progressive means more trust; more extremism means less trust).
Verboord's study shows that both these mechanisms are relevant for overall institutional trust, but values are more important for trust in the EU and in science, while performance is more important for trust in national government. Trust in news media is shaped almost equally by performance and values. Media use also has a small influence on trust: the more citizens rely on mainstream media (television, press), the more trust they have. Reliance on social media and video platforms, however, decreases trust. Finally, there are also differences between countries: the Nordic countries tend to be more trustful.
Implications of the study are that taking into account how citizens think about societal issues is just as relevant for trust as looking purely at the performance of institutions. Also, fighting polarisation contributes to the strengthening of institutional trust. Possible consequences for the #TRUEDEM project were discussed at the end of the webinar.
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The paper was originally published in The International Journal of Press/Politics.
