Polycrisis and Trust in Germany
Polycrisis and Trust in Germany
Picture BOY ANTHONY (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, January 17th 2025, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas)
Polycrisis and Trust in Germany
Alexander Patzina
Substitute Professor in Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt
Assistant Professor, University of Bamberg
Please register here to join us
Trust is a crucial aspect of social cohesion within societies, fostering democratic participation, acceptance of redistributive policies, and compliance with public health measures. However, the current convergence of global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, economic instability, wars, and global refugee flows, raises concerns about potential declines in social and institutional trust.
Although existing literature can help to hypothesize on potential changes in trust during specific crises, little is known about the effects of multiple, overlapping crises.
Using representative panel data from Germany, we analyze how changes in district-level refugee shares, inflation adjusted income changes and the stringency of COVID-19 policies affect social and institutional trust, and whether feelings of social demotion, exclusion and the deportation of living standard are potential mediators.
By employing a three-way fixed effects estimation, we account for unobserved time-invariant differences between individuals and districts, and control for national trends in trust.
We further examine whether the regional divide in trust levels between rural East Germany and the rest of Germany can be attributed to differences in regional crises and subjective indicators.
Our preliminary findings are twofold: First, isolating the impact of crises on trust is difficult, as the influx of refugees in eastern Germany has a positive effect on social trust, while it tends to reduce institutional trust.
Second, subjective indicators serve as stronger predictors of trust in rural East Germany than in other regions, suggesting the potential for regionally divergent polarization trends in trust.
Our findings underline the importance of the regional dimension in understanding polarization tendencies in social cohesion during crises.
