Trust in public institutions – spillover and bandwidth

Abstract

The article raises the question of whether there is a relationship between the trust that citizens have in people and the trust they have in various institutions such as public administration and media/press. The data were collected from two major surveys, and the universe is limited to citizens of two Norwegian counties. The analyses show that there is a spillover effect between the trust that citizens have in people and institutions (in general) and the degree of trust citizens have in the various particular institutions. Trust between persons, and between persons and institutions, appears to have a bandwidth-type structure. These aspects or factors can be grouped into personal trust, public institutional trust and media/ press trust. These different factors are correlated with each other.