Trust in context: National heuristics and survey context effects on political trust in the European Union
| Author | Claes H de Vreese,Erika J van Elsas,Anna Brosius |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1465116519896010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Trust in context:
National heuristics and
survey context effects
on political trust in the
European Union
Anna Brosius
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University
of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Erika J van Elsas
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University
of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Claes H de Vreese
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University
of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Abstract
Trust in the European Union is strongly related to trust in national political institutions
through extrapolation, i.e. cues from national politics. Most evidence for this mechanism,
however, is based on surveys using question blocks that present several institutions at
once in non-randomized order. We conducted six split-ballot survey experiments in five
European countries, asking about trust in national and European Union institutions (a)
separately or in the same question block and (b) in different question orders. Our findings
demonstrate survey context effects: asking about two institutions within the same ques-
tion block increases the correlation of reported levels of trust in these institutions.
Furthermore, our findings indicate that national primes decrease reported trust in the
European Union, providing novel micro-level evidence for extrapolation and cue-taking
from national politics in the formation of public opinion about the European Union.
Corresponding author:
Anna Brosius, Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe
Achtergracht 166, 1018WV Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Email: a.brosius@uva.nl
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(2) 294–311
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519896010
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Keywords
European Union, political trust, survey effects
Introduction
Evaluations of the European Union (EU) and national political institutions are
intertwined – when citizens decide whether or not they trust the EU, this judge-
ment is rarely independent from national politics. For many citizens, the EU is a
relatively remote and complex political institution, about which they have little
knowledge and few readily accessible opinions (Clark, 2014). Consequently, when
asked about the EU, citizens often rely on their evaluations of national politics and
extrapolate their opinions about the EU from those national evaluations. This
extrapolation mechanism explains why trust in the EU correlates highly with
trust in national political institutions (Anderson, 1998; Harteveld et al., 2013;
Mu~
noz et al., 2011), and why national political trust was identified as the strongest
attitudinal explanation of EU trust (Harteveld et al., 2013).
The majority of studies on the relationship between national and EU political
trust rely on surveys that include items on trust in several national and European
institutions within a single question block. Such surveys pose two major method-
ological problems for scholars with a substantive interest in either absolute levels
of trust or correlations between trusts in different institutions. First, including
different institutions as part of the same list of items with identical response
scales encourages response consistency and thus artificially increases the correla-
tion between the items. Second, within-block question order is usually not ran-
domized; items on national institutions precede EU institutions in most surveys.
Therefore, priming effects may also skew widely used measures for EU trust. This
raises the question to what extent existing findings of extrapolation reflect real-
world mechanisms, or are – to a certain degree – an artefact of the survey context.
We study the effects of survey context on the occurrence of extrapolation and
reported levels of EU trust, using an experimental set-up, which allows us to make
both methodological and theoretical contributions. First, we assess the extent and
nature of the effects of commonly used question blocks on the measurement of
institutional trust and the consequences for studies comparing national and EU
political trust. Second, and more fundamentally, the experimental set-up enables
us to put the extrapolation mechanism to a more rigorous test. Previous research
has mostly relied on correlations between measures of trust in EU institutions and
national political institutions. We use variations in survey context to analyze the
effect of cues from national politics on trust in the EU. The results contribute to
our knowledge of the cognitive processes underlying the formation of political
trust towards different levels of governance.
We distinguish two mechanisms that could produce survey context effects. First,
question order can enhance extrapolation: preceding questions about national
Brosius et al. 295
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