A new paper titled “Modeling Public Opinion Over Time and Space: Trust in State Institutions in Europe, 1989-2019”, co-authored by Marta Kołczyńska, Paul-Christian Bürkner, Lauren Kennedy, and Aki Vehtari, was published in Survey Research Methods.
The paper estimates trends in political trust in Europe in 1989-2019 based on data from 1.7 million respondents from 13 cross-national surveys, and examines levels in political trust both overall, and by age, gender, and education.
In a new paper titled “Modeling public opinion over time: A simulation study of latent trend models” and forthcoming in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, Paul Bürkner and Marta Kołczyńska propose a framework for the estimation of trends in mass public opinion based on survey data distinguishing three components: (1) the resonse model, (2) the latent trend model, and (3) representativeness adjustments. The paper focus on the second component, and compares four latent trend models that can be used for estimating trajectories of public opinion: (a) thin-plate splines, (b) Gaussian processes, (c) autoregressive models of order one, and (d) their special case, random walk models.
A new paper titled “The winner takes all the trust: populism, democracy, and winner-loser gaps in political trust in Central and Southern Europe”, published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, analyzes the effects of the status of the supported political party (whether it is government leader, junior coalition partner, or in the opposition) and the party’s level of populism, on people’s political trust. From the abstract:
Studies typically find that supporters of populist parties exhibit low political trust.
A new paper, co-authored by Marta Kołczyńska and Ireneusz Sadowski, published in the journal Acta Politica, analyzes the effects of electoral winner or loser status and performance evaluations on political trust in Poland, in the context of increasing political polarization. From the abstract:
Individuals with more favorable evaluations of government performance exhibit higher trust in the political system. People also tend to put more confidence in political institutions led by the party they support or identify with.