Investigating a typology of trust orientations towards national and European institutions: A person-centered approach

There is a growing recognition that trust attitudes towards national and European institutions are systematically related. Despite substantial research interest, the exact nature of this relationship remains unclear. We argue that a person-centered approach with its focus on identifying groups of individuals with similar attitudinal profiles provides a valuable complement to the currently standard variable-oriented approach in addressing this challenge. To illustrate, we examine the extent to which a prior typology of diffuse support for the European Union (EU) would emerge from a multilevel latent class analysis of the Eurobarometer data (2014). Our results provide support for the investigated typology by identifying four distinct trust profiles at the individual level that coalesce into separate latent clusters at the country level. Our findings underscore the value of a person-centered approach for the study of EU support.

Examining macroeconomic determinants of trust in parliament: A dynamic multilevel framework

The extensive literature on political trust has long suggested a link between macroeconomic conditions and public trust in political institutions. However, empirical evidence regarding this relationship remains ambiguous. Conflicting results appear to be related to differences in research design: while cross-sectional studies tend not to find evidence of a link between macroeconomic variables and trust in political institutions, most longitudinal studies do. In this paper, using recent advances in multilevel methodology, we examine both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of macroeconomic variables on trust in national parliament within a single dynamic multilevel framework. By analyzing all seven waves of the European Social Survey (2002-2014), we demonstrate that declining macroeconomic performance has a negative within-country effect on trust in national parliament. At the same time, we find limited evidence in support of this association at the between-country level. This discrepancy suggests the presence of confounding factors that are unaccounted for in cross-sectional designs. We therefore argue for the importance of examining within-country effects as they provide a more stringent test of causality.