Social and institutional trust

Social trust was operationalised by asking respondents the following: ‘Do you believe that most people can be trusted in general or do you believe that one can never be too careful when dealing with other people?’. The answer categories were: ‘can be trusted’ and ‘one can never be too careful’.

Institutional trust concerns confidence in a number of political and civil society institutions and organisations. Institutional trust was operationalised by asking respondents the following: ‘Now, a number of questions about your level of trust in various organisations and how they perform. Please indicate for each type of institution how much you trust them: churches, the military, the judiciary, the press, the police, the House of Representatives, civil servants, banks, large companies, the European Union.’ The answer categories were: ‘a great deal’, ‘a fair amount’, ‘not much‘ and ‘not at all’. The categories ‘a great deal’ and ‘a fair amount’ were then aggregated, and the same was done with ‘not much’ and ‘not at all’.

The findings are based on the large-scale ‘Social Cohesion and Well-being’ survey, which was carried out between 2012 and 2023 among nearly 92 thousand persons aged 15 years and over.

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