TRUST IN INSTITUTIONS DURING TIMES OF CRISIS

Rezumat

This paper started from Mattei Doggan’s research, which emphasized that trust in institutions is plummeting, generating a political crisis. In recent years, armed conflicts and financial, health, and refugee crises faced by EU nation states have produced not only socioeconomic tensions, but have also shaken the citizens’ trust in both national and supranational institutions. Institutional trust is important due to the fact that it directly illustrates people's support towards national and supranational organizations. Political scientists, such as David Easton and Pippa Norris, have argued that trust in institutions is an indicator of organizational efficiency. Institutional trust has been extensively researched, from a numerical perspective, illustrating how it has evolved over time. However, the way in which peoples’ levels of trust changed during and after a period of crisis and what are the factors which influenced these attitude shifts are fairly undocumented. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic occurred recently, there is a lack of literature regarding the way in which citizens’ trust in national and supranational organizations has evolved before, during and after the period of the Coronavirus. This research, which analysis the influence of the health crisis on institutional trust, provides valuable insights, by illustrating the factors which contributed to the deepening of the crisis generated by the lack of trust. This paper provides an in-depth analysis that identifies what factors influence the attitudes of Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles and Hungarians towards national and international institutions. The research method is secondary data analysis of the Eurobarometer. In this paper, I included data collected from the Spring Standard Eurobarometer between 2018 and 2023, which mostly evaluated trust in national and supranational organizations. I began with frequencies and cross-tabs to present the general trust towards institutions. Afterwards, I used Pearson Correlation, regression and factorial analyses in order to identify the attitude predictors towards trust in national and European institutions. The results were mixed. While Poles and Hungarians had more trust in national institutions than Romanians and Bulgarians before Covid, during the pandemic these differences decreased. However, Romanians and Bulgarians perceived European Institutions more positively during the pandemic. Younger and more educated people tended to have more trust in supranational institutions, regardless of nationality. Moreover, Polish people tended to regain trust in national institutions after Covid faster than others.