Mistrust
The Impact of Mistrust on the Social Contract
How do issues like corruption, lack of transparency, sustainability and accountability affect the pact and the core values of the social contract?
Trust is a big factor in building and maintaining support for political institutions. If people lose trust in politics, it could lead to a full-blown crisis of representative democracy. This would make the regime less stable, challenge the legitimacy of the social contract and affect the people's support for it.
On top of that, if there's a lack of transparency in how the EU makes policy and in the activities of the EU Parliament, the Commission or an agency, it could make people less confident in this institution and in the fundamental values of the social contract.
Various surveys, such as Eurobarometer and the European Social Survey, show that European citizens are increasingly distrustful of the EU institutions, particularly since the Great Recession. If we want to strengthen the 'social contract' and the civic virtue of European citizens, we need to understand what causes them to hesitate and feel dissatisfied with how the European institutions are working. To this end, we focus on citizens' dissatisfaction and mistrust, observing what mechanisms generate this general feeling of unease with the EU and what the institutions could do to prevent it.
Our Approach: Analysing and Addressing Mistrust
We're combining academic reviews and policy analysis of distrust in EU institutions with mixed methods research, including surveys, focus groups and interviews, to identify where there's a lack of trust in EU institutions, map levels of trust across EU countries and develop recommendations for improving the social contract through trust.
WP8 leader
Juan Antonio Mayoral
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M))