| This study asks: Do Europeans examine all institutions of the European Union (EU) through the same lens? If so, what factors hold the most predictive power in determining whether an individual will trust or not trust this bundle of institutions? The study explores the individual-level factors that may condition how EU citizens think about trust and the EU. The central argument of the research is that these institutions are viewed the same by EU citizens and consequently there will be little variation in trust measures. Moreover, the study posits that there is some other conditioning factor beyond those already established in the literature (economic utilitarianism, trust in the national government, political ideology, and cognitive mobilization) playing a role in shaping the propensity of individual citizens to trust institutions. There are not well-developed assessments of the institutions. Rather, citizens use predispositions to determine whether they trust or do not trust a particular institution. Trust is not based on performance measurements or knowledge, but the general tendencies for individual citizens to either trust or not trust in general. This approach is fundamentally different from previous examinations of trust in the European Union. The paper uses opinion data from Eurobarometer 69.2 (2008) to test these arguments and alternative hypotheses. The results indicate that Europeans do in fact bundle all of the EU institutions studied together when deciding whether to trust. Furthermore, trust in any institution (e.g. the national legal system and the internet) holds the most predictive power of all variables in the analyses, indicating the presence of some preceding variable that conditions individuals to either generally trust or not trust institutions. |
