Split-ballot Experiment on Trust Scales

This project examines how survey measurement strategies capture citizens’ trust, mistrust, and distrust towards political institutions and political actors in contemporary Europe. Using original data from the EXPRESS2 Survey, a large cross-national public opinion survey conducted in 25 countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom), the study focuses on whether traditional measures of political trust adequately capture negative trust orientations. In each country, approximately 1,500 respondents are surveyed, yielding a total sample of around 37,500 individuals. Samples are designed to be representative of the adult population with respect to gender, age, and region of residence. The survey collects detailed information on political attitudes, including institutional trust, political behaviour, and attitudes towards gender equality and digitalisation. A central component of the project is a split-ballot experiment that contrasts a traditional trust scale with an alternative trust–distrust scale designed to explicitly capture negative evaluations. In addition, the survey includes a battery of questions measuring trust, mistrust, and distrust as distinct orientations, following established approaches in the literature (e.g. Devine et al., 2020; Bunting et al., 2021), applied to European Union institutions and politicians. This design allows the project to assess whether the alternative scale more effectively captures active distrust -typically conflated with low trust in conventional measures - and to compare how different measurement approaches map onto theoretically distinct trust orientations. The findings are expected to contribute to methodological debates on measuring political trust and to substantive discussions on distrust, democratic legitimacy, and governance in Europe.