| dc.description.abstract | Trust in political institutions is one of the key elements that makes representative democracies work. Trust creates a connection between the citizens and the political institutions of the communities. There is no agreement in the literature on how domestic political conditions affect trust in the EU and it’s institutions. Does trust in domestic political conditions foster or hinder trust in the EU-parliament? Some scholars argue that there is a spill-over effect, where the citizens use domestic proxies to evaluating their trust to the EU. This argument says that it is a congruence between citizen’s trust in the EP and their attitudes towards national conditions. In this study I address this as “the congruence model”. On the other hand, some scholars argue that the citizen’s trust in the EP is different from the domestic conditions. If the national conditions are bad, citizens will give their support to the EU, as a search for someone to help them better their national conditions. On the other hand, if the national conditions are good, citizens will not give their support to the EP because they do not want a higher level of governance to affect the well-functioning conditions. This, I will address “the differential model”. To test these, I use both individual and contextual indicators in a multilevel model with data from the European Social Survey. The findings suggest that the congruence model operates at the individual level and the differential model operates at the country-year level. | nb_NO |
