Trust Me, They are Under Control: Parliamentary Oversight Activity and Citizens’ Attitudes Towards Parliaments in Central and Eastern Europe

The low or declining trust of citizens in parliaments across the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) raises concerns for the stability of these new democracies. Consequently, scholars systematically traced the various sources of citizens’ trust in CEE parliaments such as national economic development, level of corruption, individual characteristics of citizens, and parliamentary ethics regulations. In this study, I focus on the underexplored effect that the actual performance of parliamentary functions has on the citizens’ trust in parliaments. More concretely, I test whether the extent of parliamentary oversight of the executive by means of ad hoc parliamentary investigative committees leads citizens to place varying degree of trust in parliament. Following the extant literature, I also expect that the effect is conditional on the level of individuals’ attentiveness to politics. For this purpose, I combine the individual-level survey data from Eurobarometer with an original dataset on the (non-)establishment of 369 proposed parliamentary investigative committees across 10 CEE countries between early 2000s and 2023. Taking advantage of the longitudinal data, I model both the absolute number of established investigative committees and the change in their number compared to the previous period as predictors of individuals’ parliamentary trust. The findings of the study have implications for the relationship between parliaments and citizens, particularly regarding the accountability relations in parliamentary democracies.