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Trust in Institutions Between Objective and Subjective Determinants: A Multilevel Analysis in European Countries

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Abstract

Trust is an essential element for effective social cohesion and a correct expression of the principles of representative democracy. In many countries of the Western world, we are witnessing the advance of anti-establishment political movements and a steady decline of trust in institutions. Crisis, perception of crisis, climate of opinion around it have an impact on political attitudes and diversified feelings (interest, trust, resentment), on political participation and on voting. Social analysts are called to deepen the reasons for the variability of these phenomena according to socio-cultural contexts and individual characteristics. The main aim of this paper is to analyse: (1) if and how much the spread of trust in institutions is different among the EU citizens and (2) what are the determinants of trust, deepening the intensity and the direction of the relationships with subjective and objective indicators. Our purpose is to outline the differences among the EU countries regarding trust in national and international institutions, simultaneously considering macro (country) and micro (individual) level of analysis by using a multilevel approach. The empirical analysis is based on the data collected by European Social Survey (ESS-Round 8) in 2016 (microdata) and on some variables (macrodata) taken from other statistical sources (Eurostat, Transparency International). The sample of individuals counts about 37 thousand subjects. Data analysis includes the construction of synthetic indices, using appropriate synthesis methods, and the identification of the determinants of Trust in Institutions, considering both micro and macro level explanatory variables, resorting to Multilevel Regression.

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Notes

  1. https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org.

  2. In many of the EU countries (except Austria and in some cases Hungary), the age to vote is 18 years old. Therefore, only individuals aged 18 and over were considered because they were presumed more interested in politics.

  3. The analysis focused only on the European Union countries, since they are presumed to have more common aspects than other countries outside the EU. Therefore, the following countries comprised in the ESS round 8 were not considered: Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Israel, the Russian Federation.

  4. For all PCA applications, to evaluate the robustness of the Regression Factor scores, Bartlett scores were also calculated. These different calculation procedures led to the same results.

  5. The transformation was the following:

    $$t_{ij}^{'} = \frac{{t_{ij} - \hbox{min} (t_{i} )}}{{\hbox{max} (t_{i} ) - min(t_{j} )}} \times 10$$

    where tji′ is the normalized value of i-th trust index in the j-th respondent and ti is the original value of i-th trust index. The categories are the following: very distrustful (0–3); distrustful (4–5); trustful (6–7); very trustful (8–10).

  6. STATA software was applied. According to EES documentation, two weighting variables were used: PSPWGHT (post-stratification weights) and PWEIGHT (population size weights).

  7. In the models all covariates were group-mean centered.

  8. The assumptions underlying the multilevel regression (linear relationship, homoscedasticity and normal distribution of the residuals) were tested. The scatterplot of standardized residuals showed that the data met the assumptions of linearity, but did not meet the assumption of homoscedasticity, therefore robust standard errors (Huber-White heteroscedasticity consistent standard errors) was used. Moreover, tests to see if the data met the assumption of collinearity indicated that multicollinearity was not a concern (VIF < 10; Tolerance > 0.1) (“Appendix”).

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  1. Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Isabella Mingo & Maria Paola Faggiano

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Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 2 and Table 15.

Fig. 2
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Post-estimation

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Table 15 Collinearity test diagnostic
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Mingo, I., Faggiano, M.P. Trust in Institutions Between Objective and Subjective Determinants: A Multilevel Analysis in European Countries. Soc Indic Res 151, 815–839 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02400-0

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