Trust as a Political “Currency”. How Political Elites and Representatives of CSOs Describe the State of Political Trust and its Changes. The Case of Austria.

Research shows that democracies face significant challenges, including declining trust in democracy, declining institutional trust, crises in political representation, the sharp polarization of society and growing populist movements. In many European countries, populist and authoritarian actors are on the rise, exploiting the increasing social division, the increasing inequality and precariousness of living conditions and thus also the dissatisfaction. Citizens' trust in political institutions such as the government, parliament and political parties has suffered in recent years. But trust is of great importance, because trust in institutions and people guarantees that “democracy works”. Political trust is often equated with diffuse regime support and is therefore associated with the effective functioning and stability of the political system. But what if trust decreases or no longer exists at all? The three-year multinational research project TRUEDEM - Trust in European Democracies - which is funded by the European Commission's Horizon program, has dedicated a large work package to empirical research (quantitative and qualitative). The qualitative data collection aimed to understand how actors evaluate decisions about the trustworthiness of the political system, their judgment-making mechanisms, and the individual and collective factors that influence trust. Our empirical methodology is based on interviews with political elites and with representatives of civil society organizations designed according to the principle of a mirror survey. This paper presents selected results for Austria on the meaning of political trust and political trust trends, describes the state of political trust in Austria from the perspective of political elites and representatives of civil society organizations and provides - from the perspective of those surveyed - the answers why it appears this way. Changes in trust, perceptions of trustworthiness and whether declining political trust is a cause for concern are also presented. The TRUEDEM database created as part of the project also enables a comparative look on the outcomes of the dimensions mentioned above.