Puranen, Bi Welzel, C., Brunkert, L., Turska-Kawa, A., Batko, K., | 2025
TRUEDEM: Trust in European Democracies 2023-2025
This document is a part of work package 4 led by (LUL, C. Welzel). With the background of the geo-political confrontation the paper proceeds in four sections. The first section discusses the gist and diverse misunderstandings in the treatment of modernization theory, especially concerning its "rational choice" contender: the median voter theorem (section two). In section three, we reflect the role of citizens' institutional trust within the global system rivalry between democracy and autocracy (or more generally between liberalism and coercion). The fourth section then places our thoughts and evidence into a broader sequence of the psychological forces driving democratic progress, regress or stagnation. As will become evident, citizens' institutional trust certainly has its place in this sequence, but in a different manner than is usually understood: What matters is not just the overall level or amount of institutional trust but whether and to what degree citizens' institutional trust is driven by emancipatory value standards that guide individuals from "devout" to "demanding" trustworthiness judgements concerning the institutions governing their public life.
