The purpose of the project “Causes and Consequences of Political Trust: Polarization and Democratic Utility of Trust in Cross-national Perspective” is to advance the research on political trust by (1) developing a multi-level theoretical model of the causes and consequences of political trust that takes into account both the level of trust in society and its distributional properties, such as polarization, (2) creating a country time series of measures of political trust levels and polarization derived from existing individual-level survey data via Bayesian dynamic latent trait modeling, and (3) applying appropriate causal and multi-level modeling techniques to the newly constructed time series, as well as to the existing cross-national and panel survey data. The fundamental research questions deal with (a) the sources of political trust, and to what extent trust is derived from three key dimensions of performance: economic, institutional, and democratic, (b) the consequences of political trust in the three domains, and (c) the role of political polarization in this process.
The project is led by Marta Kołczyńska at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and funded by the National Science Centre under grant number 2019/32/C/HS6/00421.