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While public trust in the judicial system has been extensively explored in the US, this has been less common in Europe. The purpose of this paper is therefore to launch a research agenda on trust in courts. This is based on an overview of the empirical studies on trust/distrust in courts in Europe, which are assessed critically in light of the trust literature. We connect the concept of multilevel governance in which the EU operates to the concept of multilevel trust, which concerns the interrelations between interpersonal trust, interorganizational trust and system trust. Furthermore, we add structure to the existing literature on trust in and within courts in Europe by categorizing it into two main categories: (i) studies that focus on trust in courts within one (national or European) legal system and (ii) those that explore the interaction of trust in and between courts at different levels of governance (multilevel governance). We further examine whether different relational and institutional aspects of trust in courts, their drivers, dynamics and effect, as well as the recent trend of specialization in court systems have been sufficiently covered in the literature.

AbstractThis article examines the characteristics of transitions in the quality of relationships from fear and distrust to trust and collaboration in the encounters between immigrant parents and child welfare services and explores what these changes demonstrate about trust and collaboration within such contexts. The study draws on empirical data from interviews with ten immigrant parents who have experience with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services due to allegations of child abuse and/or neglect. The findings show that the transition from fear and distrust to trust and collaborative relations does not evolve in clearly defined phases but rather unfolds as a complex cyclical process. This process appears to involve fear, distrust, and uncooperative behavior as a point of departure but can, in some cases, develop into trusting and collaborative relations with disruption and restoration during the process. The characteristics of the transitions seem to demonstrate that parents can engage in trusting and collaborative relations amid institutional distrust, fear, and vulnerability, if they experience the encounter as meaningful. The turning points in this regard include the following: (1) parents' experience of positive interactions and relational trust with child welfare professionals and (2) defining moments in the subsequent intervention process, including parents' awareness that the intervention will not lead to child removal and/or the positive impacts of therapeutic intervention measures like parental training courses, counseling, and financial support.

To investigate how Covid-19 is shaping the way Europeans think about institutions, we conducted a large online survey experiment during the first wave of the epidemic (June). With a randomised survey ow we varied whether respondents are given Covid-related treatment questions first, before answering the outcome questions. We find that the crisis has severely undermined trust in politicians, the media, the EU and social welfare spending financed by taxes. This is mainly due to economic insecurity, but also because of health concerns. We also uncover a rallying effect around (scientific) expertise combined with populist policies losing ground.

While research has provided evidence that culture and institutional performance shape individual level trust in political institutions, scholars have neglected to adequately estimate the effect of political institutions and macroeconomic conditions on trust. Using data from the World Value Surveys for eleven Latin American cases, we test if countries with "partyizing" electoral systems -- those with rules that encourage voters to hold the party, not individuals, accountable for government performance -- experience lower levels of distrust in political parties and the legislature in times of poor economic conditions than those countries with "personalizing" electoral rules. Our analysis shows that the macro political and economic context largely conditions the impact of culture and institutional performance on political trust. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

European strategy research is a relatively late entrant into the field of strategic management. This has put the European strategy researchers at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their American counterparts when it comes to competing for scarce publication space in "top" journals. Many European researchers have responded to the challenge by adopting research paradigms that are dominant in American strategy research, but others argue that Europe should maintain its own distinct research tradition. In this paper, I argue that European ambivalence toward market-based competition for scholarly reputation combined with centralized funding of research is responsible for this division of opinion. However, I also argue that institutional differences between Europe and the United States contribute to a diversity in strategy research that should be welcomed rather than suppressed.

AbstractOften portrayed as social resistance fueled by authorities' discrimination and legal racism, minorities' noncompliance is considered to undermine the current order and commonly ascribed to distrust in government. To better understand noncompliance as a manifestation of distrust, this article focuses on the well‐documented violation of planning, building, and property laws among the Israeli‐Arab minority, who consistently exemplify distrust in government. Differing from current research, our analysis explores what facilitates noncompliance on‐the‐ground, draws on face‐to‐face interviews with 30 Arab‐Israeli offenders who built their houses illegally, and uses the noncompliant behavior as the unit of analysis. In contrast to the common idiosyncratic portrayal of noncompliance, illegal building emerged as depending on a threefoldcollectiveeffort: institutional, social, and practical. Uncovering collective support mechanisms for noncompliance suggests that distrust in government is compensated by trust in informal arrangements, thus raising new dilemmas around where personal responsibilities end and public ones begin.

Institutional-based approaches to trust can explain how trust logics can exist in a societal context as compared to logics of distrust. Strong institutions in the form of regulative, normative and cognitive structures can enable and inspire trust-relations among people at the interpersonal and inter-organizational level. We suggest, however, that the actor-dimension of institutional-based trust is an underexplored issue in the literature. Quoting Fligstein, institutional theory needs to explain how 'some social actors are better at producing desired social outcomes than are others' (Fligstein, 1997: 398). While Fligstein refers to actors who engage in 'robust or local action' we argue that actors who engage in (robust, local) sensemaking activities are better at (re)producing institutional-based trust. Particularly in situations when institutions are relatively unstable, unfamiliar to the actors and ambiguous, sensemaking strategies directed towards exploring the institutional foundations of trust at a local level can be an important basis of interpersonal trust-relations. First, based on a summary of studies of institutional-based trust we argue that an unresolved issue is how institutions more precisely form the basis for trust-relations. Second, we explore how sensemaking may serve as a bridge between institutional contexts and interpersonal trust processes. Based on Weber and Glynn's (2006) model of relations between institutions and sensemaking, we argue that institutions are 'emerging' rather than 'impacting'. The relevance of this view of sensemaking for bridging institutional-based and interpersonal trust processes is illustrated by reviewing a case study on how trust is created in a politically turbulent and foreign environment.

Distrust of public authorities is a mainstay of democratic politics. In recent decades, however, concern with surging civic suspicion has led political scientists to emphasize the value of trust for good government. This article advances a novel reading of Jeremy Bentham's political theory to shed light on the promise and perils of these two dispositions. Trust and distrust go together, in Bentham's account. In making this case, I reexamine Bentham's reflections on publicity, and distinguish between two perspectives implicit in his theory—the perspective of institutional design, and the perspective of popular oversight. This distinction brings clarity to Bentham's surprising recommendation: sober distrust toward public authorities generally, together with particularized trust in those (and only those) institutions or officials who prove themselves worthy of it.

Since the introduction of black economic empowerment (BEE) in South Africa by the African National Congress (ANC) in 2003, the impact of the legislation and its accompanying policies on the six major "PESTIS" (political, economic, social, technological, institutional and structural-physical) macro-environments in which businesses in the private sector and government in the public sector operate, has largely gone unnoticed or has been ignored. In an exploratory study using the "5 Star" research methodology, and with the aid of specially developed qualitative research adjudication matrix (QRAM), the impact of the ANC's BEE policies on these macro-environments was investigated. Unfortunately, it appears that these policies have negatively affected South Africa's political, economic, social/cultural and institutional macro-environments. Allegations of state capture and nefarious influences on government and ministerial appointments, poor economic performance and possible further credit downgrade to "junk" status by the international ratings agencies, increased prevalence of racism, hate speech and discrimination, and violation of the Constitution of South Africa and international treaties by the ANC government, paint a dismal picture. In addition, the coun¬try is facing unseen high levels of corruption, graft, fraud, looting, bribery, nepotism and self-enrichment in government, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and businesses. BEE can be regarded as the ANC's "Achilles heel" in South Africa, and the political party should rather abandon this policy in order to stop the rot, and further deterioration, distrust and decay in the country's most important macro-environments.

According to the optimistic reading of the trust deficit in contemporary democracies, an increasingly non-religious and presumably more rational citizenry is naturally inclined to distrust public institutions. This modern shift is viewed as a positive check that can supposedly improve representative government. We propose a more nuanced understanding of the influence of supernatural beliefs on institutional trust. Specifically, we move beyond the popular analytical dichotomy between the religious and the non-religious by separating the non-religious into a non-believer segment and a segment hitherto overlooked by studies of political trust: unconventional or heterodox believers (e.g., in astrology, lucky charms, divination and faith healing, but not in conventional religion). Using comparative data from the International Social Survey Programme, we find that heterodox believers, similarly to non-believers, tend to distrust institutions, albeit for very different reasons. The previously ignored role of heterodox beliefs points to grave implications regarding the current trust deficit.

Political right-wing orientation correlates with climate change denial in several Western countries. Politicians and voters of far-right (i.e., radical and extreme right-wing) parties seem to be particularly inclined to dismiss climate change but the reason for this is unclear. Thus, the present paper investigates if and why climate change denial is more common among voters of the radical right-wing party Sweden Democrats as compared to voters of a mainstream right-wing party (the Conservative Party, Moderaterna), and compares both these voter groups with center-left (Social Democrat) voters. In four regression analyses, distrust of public service media (Swedish Television, SVT), socioeconomic right-wing attitudes, and negative attitudes toward feminism and women were the strongest predictors of climate change denial. These variables outperformed conservative ideologies (Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation), anti-immigration attitudes, distrust of the Parliament and courts, and belief in conspiracies, in predicting denial. Party preferences explained only a small or zero part of variance in denial over and above these variables. The results suggest that even though radical and mainstream right-wing parties emphasize different sociopolitical issues and anti-establishment messages, similar psychological factors seem to explain why these voter groups differ from each other and from left-wing voters in climate change denial. However, the included independent variables were intercorrelated, which calls into question to what degree they can be separated when explaining psychological underpinnings of climate change denial.

It is suggested in this paper that the Court of Justice has made a modest, although by no means a trivial, move towards becoming the Constitutional Court of Europe, particularly in the N.S. case, where it rejected the Union's guiding rule of automatic reliance on the principle of mutual confidence. The paper proposes that this represents a test, labelledthe "horizontal Solange" test and which is composed of two tiers. The first, substantive, tier forms the Solange component. Cooperation between Member States will be maintained as long as all the Member States systematically adhere to core European fundamental rights. If the evidence shows that a systemic violation of core European fundamental rights took place in a Member State, other Member States should suspend their cooperation. The second, institutional, tier forms the "horizontal" component. The national courts are entrusted with the task of reviewing whether the other Member States abide by the European standard of protection of fundamental rights.The exact substantive contours of the test are examined alongside the test's possible implications for related fields of law of the European legal order. The test also allows the ECJ to interweave the different European fundamental rights systems into a fully integrated judicial dialogical network, and to steer the exact direction in which European legislation should advance.

Institutional and political distrust are often associated with the improved electoral performance of extremist parties. This study analyses to what extent political distrust and Euroscepticism are associated with extreme left and right ideological positions. We specifically examine voters in the Netherlands – a country with wide array of political parties spanning a broad ideological spectrum. The study utilises probability samples from the Dutch National Election Survey and the European Election Studies, as well as opt-in samples collected through Vote Advice Applications (VAAs), amounting to a total of 20,548 analysed respondents. By employing hierarchical regression analyses, we find that across multiple elections at the national and European level, both radical left and radical right respondents are more prone to be politically distrustful and Eurosceptic, than respondents who profess a centrist political ideology. In addition, our analyses suggest that distrust and Euroscepticism can be explained by respondents' party preference.

Objective: Black/African American people have long reported high, albeit warranted, distrust of the US health care system (HCS); however, Blacks/African Americans are not a homogenous racial/ethnic group. Little in­formation is available on how the subgroup of Black Americans whose families suffered under US chattel slavery, here called De­scendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS), view health care institu­tions. We compared knowledge of unethical treatment and HCS distrust among DAEUS and non-DAEUS.Design and Setting: A cross-sectional random-digit dialing survey was adminis­tered in 2005 to Blacks/African Americans, aged 21-75 years, from the University of Pennsylvania Clinical Practices in Philadel­phia, Penn.Participants: Blacks/African Americans self-reported a family history of persons enslaved in the US (DAEUS) or no family history of persons enslaved in the US (non- DAEUS).Main Outcome Measures: HCS distrust was measured by a validated scale assessing perceptions of unethical experimentation and active or passive discrimination.Methods: We compared responses to the HCS distrust scale using Fisher's exact and t-tests.Results: Of 89 respondents, 57% self-re­ported being DAEUS. A greater percentage of DAEUS reported knowledge of unethical treatment than non-DAEUS (56% vs 21%; P<.001), were significantly more likely to express distrust, and to endorse the pres­ence of covert (eg, insurance-based) than overt forms (eg, race-based) of discrimina­tion by the HCS.Conclusions: DAEUS express greater HCS distrust than non-DAEUS, patterned by awareness of unethical treatment and passive discrimination. Understanding how long-term exposure to US institutions influ­ences health is critical to resolving dispari­ties for all Black/African American groups. Rectifying past injustices through repara­tive institutional measures may improve DAEUS' trust and engagement with the US HCS.Ethn Dis. 2021:31(3):417-424; doi:10.18865/ed.31.3.417