Delighted that the paper I'm proudest of has just been accepted for publication at @bjpols.bsky.social 🥳
In it, we investigate global trends in political trust, using data from 50 different survey projects!
Check out the pre-print here: osf.io/preprints/os...
And some results below 👇
We* find that trust in "representative" institutions has been declining by ~10 p.p. among democracies since 1990, but trust in "implementing" institutions has been rising!
*I, @drjennings.bsky.social, Gerry Stoker, @hannahbunting.bsky.social, @danjdevine.bsky.social, Lawrence McKay & Andrew Klassen
However, there are important nuances: first, trust in parliaments, governments and parties has been declining overall in Europe and North America, but trends in other regions are less clear. In Latin America, trust was rising until 2010 but has collapsed since then.
Looking at countries, trust in parliament has been declining in about 36 democracies, rising in 6, and largely trendless in the rest. Country differences are important! The "risers" are all smaller countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand and Ecuador.
Trust declines are clearest in Eastern Europe since the 1990s, in Southern Europe after the 2008 crisis, and among several bigger countries in the longer term: the US, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, South Korea and Spain (and probably also Canada and the UK).
In sharp contrast, trust in "implementing" institutions has been either stable or rising practically everywhere: in particular, trust in the police has been rising by about 15 percentage points globally (among democracies) since 1990!
These graphs are based on the Bayesian dynamic latent trait models developed by @chrisclaassen.bsky.social - we also ran multi-level regression models and Stimson's dyad-ratios algorithm: all show basically the same results. More details in the paper and here: osf.io/kta7p
