TrustGov: Trust and Trustworthiness in National and Global Governance

There is widespread concern among scholars and popular commentators that citizens have grown more distrustful of politicians, sceptical about political institutions, and disillusioned with democratic processes and principles. Cynicism about government is thought to erode civic engagement and conventional forms of political participation, to reduce support for progressive public policies, and to provide the oxygen fuelling authoritarian-populist forces. The risks of democratic backsliding are regarded as particularly serious if public scepticism spreads upwards from core institutions of governance to corrode citizens' evaluations about the performance of liberal democracy and even its core ideals. Some fear a flagging civic culture may potentially contribute towards what many observers see as a liberal democratic retreat around the world.

This project develops a theoretically novel, empirically ambitious and methodologically innovative approach to understanding how trust in agencies of national and global governance relates to trustworthiness. It uses a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to advance our understanding of the drivers of trust and how citizens make trust judgements. These include survey analysis, experiments and focus groups, drawing evidence from a large number of countries.

As part of its activities the TrustGov project sponsored surveys in a number of countries for the 7th Wave of the World Values Survey.