Votre environnement personnel influence-t-il votre confiance dans les institutions? (document en anglais)

1. Overview

“How is one’s personal environment affecting trust in public institutions?” In order to answer this question we first have to answer the following sub-question: What do we mean by personal environment? We define the personal environment as all the factors directly influencing us in our daily decision-making. To represent this micro environment we chose several variables out of the European Social Survey data set and after two confirmatory factor analyses we regressed them against a newly created variable: Trust in Public Institutions.

2. Introduction

Our research focuses on the level of trust European citizens have in their institutions related to their personal and social environment. Since we have been in an economic crisis for the past couple of years which has strongly affected people’s immediate environment we were interested to explore the relationship between these personal factors and the overall trust the population has in public institutions.

We stand behind the hypothesis that the “better” the personal environment of an individual, the higher its trust in public institutions. In our analysis we will condense a large amount of data through several confirmatory factor analyses, the first resulting in our dependent variable itself (trust in public institutions) and the second one representing the access to media, one of our explanatory variables. We will be performing a linear regression at the end of this analysis to show the impact of the different explanatory variables and of the factors we will extract on our dependent variable. For this reason we have to assume that firstly we have a representative sample, secondly, that our error terms are random, have a mean of 0, are uncorrelated among each other, normally distributed and homoscedastic (that the random variables have the same variance).

3. Data Description

The data we use to carry out our research stems from a secondary source of data, the European Social Survey Round 4 which includes data from 30 countries but we decided to exclude Israel from our research since it is the only country not geographically in Europe. The data has already been screened for missing values and we cannot access the original input data. The following shows a summary of the variables used which represent a total number of 54,262 observations.

Figure 3.1 Case Summaries

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Skewness Kurtosis

Trust in overall institutions 45209 -2,11622 2,76995 ,0075246 1,00185060 -,135 -,556

How satisfied with life as a whole 53842 Extremely dissatisfied Extremely satisfied 6,52 2,444 -,767 ,044

How often socially meet with friends, relatives or colleagues 53818 Never Every day 4,83 1,634 -,477 -,707

Years of full-time education completed 53800 0 50 11,89 4,204 -,030 ,991

Media Usage 27198 -1,92889 6,22654 -,0209150 ,97685553 1,428 4,134

Feeling about household's income nowadays 53690 Living comfortably on present income Very difficult on present income 2,20 ,911 ,414 -,599

Total hours normally worked per week in main job overtime included 43034 0 168 40,87 13,488 ,136 4,183

State of health services in country nowadays 53605 Extremely bad Extremely good 4,94 2,604 -,157 -,844

Member of a group discriminated against in this country 53518 Yes No 1,93 ,253 -3,406 9,602

How religious are you 53684 Not at all religious Very religious 4,88 2,987 -,148 -,998

We choose different kinds of variables:

- Quantitative variables:

o Years of full-time education completed

o Total hours normally worked per week in main job overtime included

- Qualitative variables (all ordinal):

o How often do you meet with friends, relatives or colleagues? With an anchored scale from 1 = “never” to 7 = “everyday”,

o Access to media with an anchored scale from 0 = “no time at all” to 7 = “more than 3 hours”,

o Trust in overall institutions with an anchored scale from 0 = “no trust at all” to 10 = “complete trust”;

o How satisfied with life as a whole? With an anchored scale from 0 = “extremely dissatisfied” to 10 = “extremely satisfied”,

o Feeling about household´s income nowadays with an anchored scale from 1 to 4.

o State of health services in country nowadays with an anchored scale from 0 = “extremely bad” to 10 = “extremely good”,

o How religious are you? With an anchored scale from 0 = “not at all” to 10 = “very religious”

- Dummy variables:

o Member of a group discriminated against in this country with 1 standing for “Yes” and 2 standing for “No”.

3.1 Dependent Variables

In our analysis the dependent variable is the overall Trust in Public Institutions, which is a factor made up of 7 other variables: trust in country’s parliament, trust in the legal system, trust in the police, trust in politicians, trust in political parties, trust in the European Union and trust in the United Nations. These seven variables are measured on a scale from 0 to 10, 0 being “no trust at all” and 10 being “complete trust”. Our regression tests the other variables against this factor and we believe them to have a strong impact on the latter in accordance with our hypothesis.

Figure 3.2

Trust in Public Institutions

TRSTPRL Trust in country’s parliament

TRSTLGL Trust in the legal system

TRSTPLC Trust in the police

TRSTPLT Trust in politicians

TRSTPRT Trust in political parties

TRSTEP Trust in the

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