The Road to Trust. A Vignette Study on the Determinants of Citizens' Trust in the European Commission

Schafheitle, Simon Daniel; Weibel, Antoinette; Meidert, Nadine; Leuffen, Dirk

doi:10.1111/jcms.12901

Cited by 11 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(117 reference statements)

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“…Not only do voters in northern countries worry about moral hazard (Rathbun et al 2019), but citizens in countries that experience a lower quality of government are also more likely to reject sole national governance of the fund as they benchmark the EU against their national government's performance (De Vries 2018, 55). In contrast, supranational decision-making by the European Commission may suffer from a lack of legitimacy and trust (Schafheitle et al, 2020). Hence, we expect that the intergovernmental option is likely to be the least controversial option, given that it retains some form of national control while reflecting the desirability for joint decision-making of European programs.…”

Section: Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

In This Together? Support for European Fiscal Integration in the COVID-19 Crisis

Bremer¹,

Kuhn²,

Meijers³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Fiscal integration has long been regarded as a necessary condition to ensure the long-term stability of the euro. In the aftermath of the euro crisis, concerns about a populist backlash of Eurosceptic voters constrained national governments in their ability to pursue such integration. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, national leaders were able to agree to the Next Generation EU, a pandemic recovery fund of over 750 billion euro establishing an unprecedented, far-reaching, albeit temporary, fiscal stabilization capacity. Still, we know very little about citizens’ preferences towards the pandemic recovery fund? To answer this question, we conducted an original survey experiment on public support for different designs of a European pandemic recovery fund. We fielded the survey in five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain) in July 2020, at the time that national leaders agreed on the recovery fund. Our results show that there is surprisingly high support for a joint European fiscal instrument and that citizens react to different elements of the pandemic recovery fund. They prefer a broad program that is directed at countries in need, but they are skeptical about common debt. Yet, citizens’ skepticism towards common debt is not important enough for them to negatively evaluate the program as a whole. Overall, the pandemic recovery fund agreed under ‘Next Generation EU’ is a well-tailored instrument to generate widespread political support across European member states.

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Section: Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

In This Together? Support for European Fiscal Integration in the COVID-19 Crisis

Bremer¹,

Kuhn²,

Meijers³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…But, at the same time, it might increase their satisfaction with the system's performance (output-legitimacy). familiarity (here in the form of political value congruence between trustor and trustee) breeds trust in situations of incomplete information (Mayer et al 1995;Schafheitle et al 2020). This logic might produce different trust scores when citizens evaluate different levels of government: if for example a citizen's preferred party is represented in the local executive body, but not in the national and EU government, then this citizen is more likely to trust the local government, while being more distrusting towards the two other tiers of government.…”

Section: Representation Of One's Preferred Party In Government: Home-team Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

On their own turf? The level-specificity of political trust in multilevel political systems

2021

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Although the debate on roots of political trust is ongoing, many scholars agree on the relevance of such political factors as political/ideological distance between citizens and incumbents, political responsiveness and perceptions of performance. Less clear is to what extent such trust evaluations are generalized or specific for the three main political arenas in the European multilevel governance system (EU, national, local). With new data from the Netherlands, we demonstrate that trust in local, national and EU governments (1) is largely level-specific (i.e. is based on citizens’ perceptions of incumbents at a particular governance level) (2) and—at all three levels—is explained by level-specific political factors. This shows that political trust is a subjectively rational evaluation and that citizens develop meaningful political orientations vis-à-vis governments at different levels. Therefore, trust spillovers may be less relevant for explaining political trust in multilevel governance than assumed in previous research as executive governments at local, national and EU levels are judged “on their own turf”.

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“…Macroeconomics also matter, as European citizens assess economic performance and they build trust in institutions accordingly, based on that evaluation (Van der Meer, 2018). The way Europeans perceive those economic indicators, as well as other performance measures, also affects individual level of trust in institutions (Schafheitle et al, 2020). Then, public officers must pay attention to these objective and subjective drivers of trust.…”

Section: Research Papermentioning

confidence: 99%

Government Data Openness and Coverage. How do They Affect Trust in European Countries?

Gonzálvez-Gallego

Nieto-Torrejón

2021

Journal of Data and Information Science

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Purpose This paper aims to assess if the extent of openness and the coverage of data sets released by European governments have a significant impact on citizen trust in public institutions. Design/methodology/approach Data for openness and coverage have been collected from the Open Data Inventory 2018 (ODIN), by Open Data Watch; institutional trust is built up as a formative construct based on the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 9. The relations between the open government data features and trust have been tested on the basis of structural equation modelling (SEM). Findings The paper reveals that as European governments improve data openness, disaggregation, and time coverage, people tend to trust them more. However, the size of the effect is still small and, comparatively, data coverage effect on citizens’ confidence is more than twice than the impact of openness. Research limitations This paper analyzes the causal effect of Open Government Data (OGD) features captured in a certain moment of time. In upcoming years, as OGD is implemented and a more consistent effect on people is expected, time series analysis will provide with a deeper insight. Practical implications Public officers should continue working in the development of a technological framework that contributes to make OGD truly open. They should improve the added value of the increasing amount of open data currently available in order to boost internal and external innovations valuable both for public agencies and citizens. Originality/value In a field of knowledge with little quantitative empirical evidence, this paper provides updated support for the positive effect of OGD strategies and it also points out areas of improvement in terms of the value that citizens can get from OGD coverage and openness.

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The Road to Trust. A Vignette Study on the Determinants of Citizens' Trust in the European Commission

Cited by 11 publications

References 95 publications

In This Together? Support for European Fiscal Integration in the COVID-19 Crisis

In This Together? Support for European Fiscal Integration in the COVID-19 Crisis

On their own turf? The level-specificity of political trust in multilevel political systems

Government Data Openness and Coverage. How do They Affect Trust in European Countries?

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