Social and institutional trust

To measure social trust, respondents to the survey were asked the question: ‘Do you believe that most people can generally be trusted or do you believe that one can never be too careful when dealing with other people?’ The response options were: ‘Can be trusted’ and ‘One can never be too careful’.

Institutional trust concerns confidence in a number of public, private and political institutions and organisations. The question used to gauge institutional trust in 2024 was: ‘Now a number of questions about your level of trust in various organisations and how they perform. Please indicate for each type of institution how much you trust them: churches, the military, the legal system, the press, the police, the House of Representatives, civil servants, banks, large companies, the European Union.’ The answer categories were: ‘a great deal’, ‘a fair amount’, ‘not much‘ and ‘not at all’. The categories ‘a great deal’ and ‘a fair amount’ were then aggregated, and the same was done with ‘not much’ and ‘not at all’.

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