One for All? Public Confidence in National, Regional, and International Institutions

One of the most prominent findings in recent research on public opinion towards the European Union is the strong association between citizens’ confidence in national political institutions and their confidence in the EU (e.g., Harteveld et al. 2013; Armingeon and Ceka 2014). The conventional interpretation of this association holds that citizens lack sufficient knowledge to form independent assessments about European institutions and therefore rely on their confidence in national institutions as a heuristic. In this paper, we address two fundamental questions raised by this relationship that have not been systematically explored in existing research. First, is this pattern unique to the EU or does it extend to public opinion toward international organizations in general? Second, what are the specific mechanisms that drive the association between national and international confidence? In the paper, we address these questions through a comparative analysis of popular confidence in five IOs – EU, NAFTA, IMF, WTO, and UN – in four countries – Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States – based on an original dataset. We find that confidence in the national government is the strongest predictor of confidence in all five IOs, thus confirming the general nature of the national-international association. In addition, we establish that this association is driven by two separate mechanisms in combination: generalized trust, or individuals’ tendency to trust other people, and institutional trust, or individuals’ experiences of national political institutions.