A Crisis of Political Trust? Global Trends in Institutional Trust from 1958 to 2019
University of Southampton · University of Exeter · +1 more institution
Abstract
Abstract In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 392.39
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 68
Authors
7Topics & keywords
- Politics
- Political crisis
- Political science
- Political economy
- Business
- Economics
- Law