Measuring Political Trust Across Time and Space

Trust in political institutions is considered to be of crucial importance for the stability of democratic political regimes, and as such the concept is widely used in empirical research. In this chapter I investigate the validity of the ‘institutional trust’-scale and present recent trends within institutional trust in Europe. The results are based on the four waves of the European Social Survey (ESS 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008). Trust in political institutions has been studied as a one-dimensional as well as a multidimensional concept. Using factor analysis, I investigate the validity of a one-factor measurement model of institutional trust. In a second part, I test the cross-cultural equivalence of institutional trust. Within comparative research institutional trust is studied extensively although it has not been investigated whether its meaning is the same across different countries and therefore whether itcanbe compared. In the last part of the chapter, I describe the trends in institutional trust and in satisfaction with government in Europe between 2002 and 2009