Viktor Valgarðsson

The causes of perceived government trustworthiness DANIEL DEVINE, VIKTOR VALGARÐSSON, WILL JENNINGS, GERRY STOKER, HANNAH BUNTING

🌅📙 64.3

#GovernmentTrust

These authors (🧵⬇️) use experiments in 🇬🇧🇭🇷🇪🇸🇦🇷 & 🇫🇷 to determine what has the most influence on citizen's trust. They also looked at how different trust-related qualities interact and how people's own traits change the effects.

🔗 buff.ly/H5wjxBl

Þetta hefur nú engin áhrif á ákvarðanatöku ríkisstjórnarinnar held ég, þetta er bara stjórnarandstaðan í málþófi að röfla um ekki neitt og meirihlutinn að leyfa þeim það fram á nótt.

IN NEW ISSUE: What makes a politician trusted by citizens? @viktorv.bsky.social, @drjennings.bsky.social, G Stoker, @lawrencemckay.bsky.social, @danjdevine.bsky.social & @nickclarkegeo.bsky.social find attributes of authenticity are as important as competence & integrity: buff.ly/41DzrXI OPEN ACCESS

IN NEW ISSUE: What makes a politician trusted by citizens? @viktorv.bsky.social, @drjennings.bsky.social, G Stoker, @lawrencemckay.bsky.social, @danjdevine.bsky.social & @nickclarkegeo.bsky.social find attributes of authenticity are as important as competence & integrity: buff.ly/41DzrXI OPEN ACCESS

Way to dispel the allegations...

BJPolS abstract discussing theoretical fluctuations and empirical studies in political trust, mentioning data collection from 143 countries between 1958 and 2019, and highlighting differences in trust levels at institutions, with a focus on democratic declines.

From February 2025 -

A Crisis of Political Trust? Global Trends in Institutional Trust from 1958 to 2019 - cup.org/4gCcLuT

- @viktorv.bsky.social, @drjennings.bsky.social, Gerry Stoker, @hannahbunting.bsky.social,
@danjdevine.bsky.social, @lawrencemckay.bsky.social & Andrew Klassen

#OpenAccess

Socialized to (Dis)trust? A Panel Study into the Origins of Dispositional Institutional Trust - Social Indicators Research A longstanding argument in the field of institutional trust reads that trust is the outcome of a process of socialization. This approach suggests that institutional trust may be understood as a set di...

I am really proud about this publication on trust, with Chaïm la Roi and @cvalebeek.bsky.social .
Using unique panel data, we show (1) that trust has a dispositional element among adults, and (2) that these trust attitudes are socialized during adolescence.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Að hugsa sér að maður sé bara hluti af þeirri kynslóð sem komst í gegnum það að Vikan með Gísla Marteini var seinna á dagskrá en venjulega vegna afmælistónleika Sinfó

www.ifo.de/en/press-rel...

Trust in politics is in long-term decline around the world – new research Since 1990, trust in government has been declining in democratic countries across the world.

People's trust in politics is in long-term decline, says our political expert Dr @viktorv.bsky.social.

He and his colleague’s latest study shows trust in democratic governments has been falling around the world since the 1990s.

Full @uk.theconversation.com article 👇
brnw.ch/21wQPx5

Most of the outliers within countries are surveys that use unusual response scales, and even then, the trends are mostly the same. Dichotomization also produces essentially the same trends as using the full scales...

Thanks for reading! Find the full paper and SI here: doi.org/10.1017/S000...

One of my main take-aways from doing this project was the remarkable consistency between different measures from various survey projects in terms of trends and between-country differences. Here's trust in government in WENA. Some differences, sure, but overall... they are all on to something!

There are even more nuggets in our Supplementary Materials (142 pages)!

There you can find the cleaner graphs shared above; descriptive trends; results from Stimson's method; MLMs; information on weighting and scales and more (nerd-)fascinating stuff!

But trust has also been high in the Nordics (except Iceland!), New Zealand and Switzerland - suggesting that we can look to democratic countries for potential solutions to the trust crisis. Maybe part of the answer is more money! But also equality, vibrant democracy, social cohesion, etc...?

Similarly, (reported) trust has been rising in Russia since Putin took power (in 2000) and has been stable or rising in Turkey. The very highest levels of reported trust are in China and Vietnam. High levels of trust in surveys don't tell us the whole story about the state of a country...

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, trust mostly appears to have declined in the 1990s - when many of those countries were newly independent. In Hungary, trust declined dramatically until 2010, when Orbán was re-elected and started dismantling liberal democracy. And then trust started rising!

The effects of the 2008 financial crisis are also clear in our data - but mostly in Europe. Esp. in Greece, Cyprus, Spain, and my own native Iceland. Trust also feel sharply in Italy, Portugal and Ireland in 2008, but appears to have (mostly) recovered in those countries... (graph shows parliament)

There's also an interesting non-linear trends in many countries in Latin America, where trust in representative institutions was on the rise until about 2014, after which point it started declining sharply. I'd be interested to hear people's take on this, as I'm no expert on politics in the region!

Although fairly stable overall, we also saw that trust in the legal / judicial system appears to have declined a bit globally in the 1990s. And we see clear declines in this measure in the Latin America region - especially in Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, El Salvador...

One of the findings that most surprised me was that trust in the police had been rising globally by about 12,5 percentage points! But it's worth noting that the US and UK are exceptions here. Our data also ends in 2019, before George Floyd in the US, the Casey Review in the UK, etc...

As you may have heard, our main finding is that trust in representative institutions has been declining globally (among democratic countries) but trust in implementing institutions has been stable or rising. But these broad strokes ofc. mask some interesting nuances.

Trust in politics is in long-term decline around the world – new research Since 1990, trust in government has been declining in democratic countries across the world.

Wrote a piece for the @uk.theconversation.com about our study just published in @bjpols.bsky.social:

"If it’s something about the way politics is practised that citizens distrust, perhaps those politics need to change."

Some more nuggets from our study below! 👇
theconversation.com/trust-in-pol...

Nice coverage of our paper in @bjpols.bsky.social led by @viktorv.bsky.social by @unisouthampton.bsky.social media team

Paper: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Coverage: www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2025/02...

Yeah when it's linear regression models; they're basically designed to provide predictions of y for any value of x. These are not just multiplications of the coefficients but also the differences between the predicted values in the first and last years derived from those models.

Our article 'A Crisis of Political Trust?' led by @viktorv.bsky.social is now out in @bjpols.bsky.social! We use >3,000 surveys in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019, finding that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Our paper on global trends in trust is online! Led by @viktorv.bsky.social we use >3k surveys from ~50 projects in 143 countries, the paper provides a framework for understanding changes in trust and:

(1) Trust in representative institutions is in decline
(2) but stable in implementing institutions

Screenshot from "Letter from our correspondent" in "Papua New Guinea Courier"

The Papua New Guinea Courier is in rare form.

Óháð því hvað okkur finnst um loforðið (mér finnst það galið), þá er alveg rétt hjá Singa og Simma að það er óheiðarlegt að segja fyrir kosningar að eitthvað sé ófrávíkjanlegt skilyrði fyrir stjórnarmyndun og segja svo bara eftir kosningar að það hefði þurft hreinan meirihluta... #kryddsíld