Intézményi bizalom Európa régi és új demokráciáiban
INSTITUTIONAL TRUST IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES: IS IT DIFFERENT FROM WESTERN EUROPE?

Summary/Abstract: Compared to Western European countries, the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) demonstrate signifi cantly lower and incrementally declining levels of institutional trust. This raises concerns about the public approval and legitimacy of their political systems and institutions, which some authors consider as a direct consequence of the transition process. Based on the datasets of the European Social Survey, in this paper we aim at addressing this problem by shedding light on the possible differences between old and new European democracies regarding the origins and patterns of institutional trust. We demonstrate that citizens of new European democracies are not different from Western Europeans in that they seem to be equally ready to formulate separate evaluative attitudes towards specifi c institutions. Moreover, contrary to the fi ndings of some previous research, we found that CEE and Western European citizens demonstrate comparable degrees of ‘materialistic trust’ as income levels and trust in institutions seem to be similarly associated with each other across these countries even after several socio-economic characteristics are controlled.

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