The beliefs of young parliamentary candidates on democracy and the moderation role of populism

Do foreign aid projects undermine citizens' trust in local and national political institutions? Drawing on institutional theories of political trust, I hypothesize that foreign aid projects reduce trust in political institutions by lowering citizens' perceptions of government performance and raising perceptions of corruption. To analyze the impact of aid projects on trust, this article utilizes geolocated survey data on citizens' trust in political institutions from Afrobarometer Rounds 2–5 (2003–2012) and data on the location of foreign aid projects from AidData's Aid Information Management Systems datasets for Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda. Using a spatial difference‐in‐difference strategy, the empirical results find that active aid projects are on average associated with decreased trust in the president, parliament, and local government council. An exploratory sectoral analysis suggests that the negative average treatment effect is driven by projects in the transportation, agriculture, education, and civil society sectors.

Norwegian elites exhibit a high level of trust in the main political institutions. Not surprisingly, they have more trust in the political institutions than the general citizenry has. Between 2000 and 2015, Norwegian elites’ trust in the political institutions increased significantly, as did the trust of the general citizenry. The elites’ trust is to some extent promoted by the individual top leaders’ participation in the extensive corporatist system of political decision-making characteristic of Norwegian society. An important factor behind the elites’ political trust is their political preferences. Elite individuals who support political parties on the left have more confidence in parliament and the civil service than top leaders who voted for one of the right-wing parties in 2013. This fact is another illustration of the scepticism of rightists towards an active state. The exception is confidence in the cabinet. The present political power of the conservative or right-wing parties has probably boosted the confidence of right-wing sympathisers in the cabinet.

In comparison to the heated debate over the origins of trust in political institutions, few studies have empirically examined the linkage between trust in political and nonpolitical institutions at the individual level. In this study, we utilize a two‐step methodology to investigate attitudes toward the government in the broader context of attitudes toward related nonpolitical institutions in South Korea. Results from latent class analysis reveal that political trust is an integrated part of a more general set of attitudes toward social and economic institutions. In addition, results from multinomial logistic regression analysis corroborate past studies that found a positive relationship between perceptions of institutional performance and trust in institutions while partially supporting theories advocating the importance of interpersonal trust for institutional trust. This study points to the possibility of interpersonal trust “spilling up” to trust in institutions and the likelihood that trust in one institution “spills over” to trust in other related institutions.

The overall focus of this paper is on developing a framework to explain support for alternative politics of a populist type. It has often been argued that the increasing focus on scandals and corruption has done much to alienate voters from traditional politics and that this alienation has, in turn, been reflected in what might be termed a ‘soap‐operatisation’ of politics, with an attendant diminution of trust in political institutions. We contend that, while reducing political events to variants of soap‐operas (with the demystification and banalisation of politics to which this gives rise) has had profound effects on the public perception of the political and political institutions, the result may not be simply a lack of, or diminution of, trust in politicians and political institutions, but rather a parallel growth in cynicism. The paper argues that while cynicism is often assumed to be a component of the decline in trust in institutions the two are, in fact, different and can give rise to different manifestations. We address the difference between the two concepts and develop a hypothesis that contends that supporters of populist alternatives can be located within two attitudinal clusters. We argue that, with respect to populist politicians and populist political parties, a cynical view of politics and political institutions will tend to produce individuals who support what we term ‘political entrepreneurs’, while a real distrust in institutions will translate into support for a more traditional populism of the radical right.

In a preregistered research, we examined the relationships between conspiracy mentality (i.e., the individual susceptibility to endorse conspiracy theories, Bruder et al., 2013) and trust in three actors of the COVID-19 crisis: 1) Political institutions, 2) scientific and medical institutions, and 3) the medical personnel. While the two former groups have played a direct or indirect role in decisions related to public health measures, the latter has not. We expected all these relationships to be negative and mediated by the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities to pursue secret agendas. In a study conducted with Belgian (N = 1136) and French (N = 374) convenience samples, conspiracy mentality negatively predicted trust in political institutions, and trust in scientific and medical institutions. These relations were partly mediated by belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities. In addition, distrust in political, medical and scientific institutions were highly and positively correlated, suggesting that these groups may be viewed as part of a same supra-ordinate category – the “Elites”. By contrast, we found a small negative relationship between conspiracy mentality and trust in the medical personnel in the Belgian sample, but not in the French sample. Trust in the medical personnel was unrelated to the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized, and only weakly related to distrust in political institutions. This suggests that individuals with a susceptibility to believe in conspiracy theories may not have a propensity to distrust all actors involved in the management of the pandemic, but only those directly or indirectly tied to decisions pertaining to public health measures.

The article presents the results of studying the formation of institutional trust, which will help to clarify and, at the same time, raise questions regarding the determination of the level of trust in state and political institutions in Ukraine and in modern European countries. In the context of the study, the tasks were considered to identify the factors that influence the formation of citizens’ trust in political institutions, namely: the effectiveness of the activities of political institutions; personal experience of interaction of citizens with representatives of authorities; the level of trust in the state as a whole, which can be transferred to individual state institutions. Analyzing the data from the Rounds (waves) 1-9 of the European Social Survey (ESS) in 2002-2018, the level of confidence in Ukraine’s political and public institutions and in the other European countries is compared. The analysis makes it possible to determine the factors that are present at the supra-individual level (at the country level) and which can influence the public policy of the state. The results of the study can be used to suggest possible measures to increase public confidence in major public institutions.

ABSTRACTRecent decades have seen the growth of various strands of right-wing populist political orientations, where populism and critique of immigration policies have been central. These ideological developments have caused concern for the legitimacy of social and political institutions. The question explored in this paper, based on Norwegian survey data, is ‘Which types of right political orientations exist among young people, and how do these political attitudes affect trust in social and political institutions?’ The results reveal the existence of both a populist ‘new right’ political orientation similar to the ideology of the Progress Party and a nativist ideology. The new right orientation contains two sets of variables: (i) economic liberalism/state scepticism and (ii) nationalist values. For trust in political institutions, the emerging picture is complex because the nationalist dimension of both the populist orientation and the nativist ideological orientation implies a high level of trust in political institutions. To the extent the new right political orientations causes mistrust, it seems to come from the liberal economic, anti-statist values included in this ideology. Based on these findings, future researchers should distinguish more clearly between the ideological dimensions going into populist political right orientations and the relationship between attitudes and more practical implications of such ideologies.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the analysis of the interaction between government and society in modern Russia, expressed in the phenomenon of trust. The focus of the authors’ attention is directed to the study of the impact of crisis upheavals (the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine) on the change in the trust of the population of the Russian Federation in the main political institutions. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to fix the existing forms of interaction between the authorities and society as well as identify the prospects for changing these practices in the perspective of society’s transition to a post-crisis state. Methods and materials. The methodological basis of the study was the neo-institutional approach, which made it possible to present trust because of the activity of political institutions in building and observing the “rules of the game.” The empirical basis of the study is public opinion polls conducted by the largest Russian sociological centers. Analysis and results. Trust in political institutions is presented as an important phenomenon of civilized societies, characterizing the importance of rules rather than specific personalities. The study revealed that in Russia, crisis situations, which are institutionally determined trajectories caused by external shocks that change the “rules of the game” that have developed in society and forms of communication with the authorities, are a condition for an exponential growth of trust (both generalized and institutional). At the same time, during crises, an increase in the level of trust is observed even for institutions that are traditionally criticized by most of society (such as the government and the State Duma). The youth, being reactionary and variable in their political behavior, show increased trust in political institutions. However, if adult trust is based on emotional hope for the future, youth trust is usually based on rational grounds. Yet a sharp increase in trust in the main political institutions during crises can be replaced by the same rapid decline in the conditions of “normality” when the traditional problems of socio-economic development again come to the fore on the agenda formed by society. Authors’ contributions. S.I. Morozov carried out an analysis of studies on institutional trust in modern Russia, chose and substantiated the theoretical and methodological framework of the work, and also formed the general concept of the study. K.M. Makarenko summarized and analyzed empirical data on the research topic, substantiated the role and impact of crisis shocks on institutional trust in the Russian Federation, and formulated the main conclusions of the work.

Trust in political institutions represents a central facet of political legitimacy in a democracy. A vast literature suggests that the local perception of corruption lowers trust in political institutions in different research settings. Building upon this literature, we explore whether the perception of civil service corruption and trust in political institutions are inversely associated in Brazil—a developing country significantly affected by corruption scandals—using nationally representative survey data. We find evidence of this association using ordinary least squares regression models that treat perception of civil service corruption as an exogenous variable while accounting for the impact of other determinants of political trust. However, these results could be affected by endogeneity bias due to simultaneous causation: not only does a higher perception of corruption decrease trust in political institutions, but lower levels of trust in political institutions also increase the perception of corruption. We find that this inverse association is significantly larger when we treat perception of civil service corruption as an endogenous variable using endogenous binary‐variable regression models. Political and civil society leaders in Brazil should continually participate in the development of effective accountability strategies for curbing corruption in order to challenge the vicious circle of corruption and trust.

How does armed conflict affect accountability and political trust in democratic governments? To answer this question, we present quasi-experimental evidence based on survey data which, coincidentally, were collected in the days surrounding an unanticipated violent attack by a rebel group in Mali. The chance occurrence of the attack five days into the survey demarcates respondents into two groups surveyed before and after the attack and allows us to examine how the attack affected approval of politicians and trust in political institutions. Our results show that people mainly attribute responsibility to the president and not to parliament or local government, while trust in institutions is largely unaffected. We also show that these effects are strongest in the region of the attack. These findings suggest that voters in new democracies are capable of attributing responsibility to individual politicians and governments while maintaining trust in the fundamental political institutions of democracy.

According to advocates of direct democracy, it is important to involve citizens more directly in political decision-making processes in order to create a democratic linkage between citizens and the political system. Indeed, some studies have demonstrated that citizens who live in direct democracies have higher levels of trust in political institutions and a higher sense of political efficacy. However, not all empirical evidence confirms this relationship. In a recent article on Switzerland, it was shown that, while the availability of direct democratic rights enhances trust in political institutions, using those rights actually initiates distrust. In this paper I expand the analysis of Bauer and Fatke (2014) and test whether the different effects of availability of direct democratic rights and the frequency of their use also hold for broader measures of trust in political institutions and political efficacy. I find that, even though an increased use of direct democratic measures is associated with lower levels of confidence in authorities on the cantonal level, this relationship is no longer apparent when applying a more comprehensive measurement of trust in political institutions.

Effects of digital use on trust in political institutions among ethnic minority and hegemonic group – A case study

The article examines humanitarian issues that can and should be considered together with the social component, since in most cases humanitarian and social processes accompany each other. The social and humanitarian sphere, like others, is under the influence of various factors and processes. The results of the study highlight such main aspects that the intensive development of the social and humanitarian sphere is taking place, due to the fact that in the modern world, people and human capital are becoming more and more important. The collapse of the bipolar system of interstate relations did not lead to the disappearance of the ideological factor, and the social and humanitarian component in interstate interaction became especially important. In modern world politics, the socio-humanitarian component penetrates more and more intensively into other spheres: military-political and political-economic. It has been established that social and humanitarian aspects accompany almost all conflicts. Moreover, socio-humanitarian aspects are used in a twofold way: on the one hand, phenomena of informational, "hybrid wars" arise to counter the enemy, on the other hand, to reduce tension and resolve conflicts. In the political and economic sphere, a global agreement is emerging, which forms the social responsibility of business on a global scale. In addition, various discussion platforms on political and economic issues, organized by both business structures and power structures, are receiving development. Global challenges, changes in the social and humanitarian sphere can affect global challenges, such as climate change, the fight against crime, the fight against natural disasters, they can require cooperation and coordination between countries. It was found that the increase or decrease of trust in political institutions, the transformation of the social and humanitarian sphere can affect the level of trust in political leaders and institutions in different countries, it can affect the stability and legitimacy of the government. The social and humanitarian sphere is also developing on its own, and at present it is mainly connected with the problems of higher education. In the future, other directions of development of the social and humanitarian sphere of world politics are planned, in particular, health care, international tourism and others, since the state has taken a course to increase its presence in the social and humanitarian field. It is substantiated that the mentioned issues acquired a new color and intensified, which gave a new impetus to the development of the social and humanitarian field. In addition, it was established that the social and humanitarian sphere is intensively involved in the solution of military-political issues. As a result, information and hybrid wars arise as tools for fighting the enemy, what happened for many years is happening today and on the territory of Ukraine from the side of the aggressor in the person of the Russian Federation and its regime. Today, in the modern world, there is a significant growth of the social and humanitarian component of world politics, which is manifested in all spheres of activity. At the same time, the social and humanitarian components are a single complex, and in most cases they accompany and mutually condition each other with various negative factors.

Portugal ranks among the EU27 countries with higher levels of consumer indebtedness. Contrary to the trend observed in countries with similar indebtedness rates, Portugal has one of the lowest rates of consumer default. Previous studies (e.g., Frade et al. 2006) have identified three strategies that have contributed to keep levels of credit default low: reliance on savings, financial support from relatives and friends, and cuts in household expenses. These strategies have been widely used for the last decade and have been strained since the very beginning of the global financial crisis in 2007. We argue that these three strategies are near to collapse and consequently the levels of consumer default will rise steeply in the next years. The savings rate in Portugal has been declining over time, and the social networks are limited in their action due to the current crisis that affects everyone. In this article, we advance the hypothesis that sacrificing living standards is rooted on collective beliefs about the current economic crisis in Portugal and trust in political and market agents in line with the Theory of Market Anomie (Karstedt and Farrall 2006). The conclusions are based on macroeconomic statistics and on the results of a Web survey of 1244 Portuguese households, which focuses on attitudes towards the financial crisis, trust in political and economic institutions, and strategies to cope with the crisis. The results show that trust in financial companies (banks and insurance companies) and in the European Parliament promotes a sense of empowerment to contribute to the country economic restoration. This attitude induces citizens to avoid default by sacrificing living standards. But in the current austerity context, with low levels of trust in political institutions and detachment of the economy, consumers will be less prone to sacrifice. In this scenario, credit default and insolvency is expected to rise especially in those households most exposed to unemployment and to cuts in social benefits. This reality puts a huge and growing pressure on bankruptcy procedure, civil courts, and economic and social policies. Some adjustments should be made to the Portuguese Bankruptcy Code by facilitating and simplifying the bankruptcy regime in order to accommodate the increase in insolvency cases. But the improvement of the insolvency procedure will not resolve the situation of financial distress if the structural causes persist, such as unemployment and deterioration of salaries, and cuts in social benefits. A reform of the Bankruptcy Code facilitating and simplifying the bankruptcy regime should be coupled with measures that boost the economy and stimulate the labour market. Otherwise, Portuguese households will not have the resources necessary to benefit from the bankruptcy process and regain the control over their financial lives.

Trust in Political-Administrative Relations: The Case of Local Authorities in Norway and Tanzania