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    The ‘meso-level’ as a lens for evaluating politics:  how economic performance at different meso levels explains variation in political trust

    4 July 2025

    MAG 2025. Authors: Twan Huijsmans (Universiteit van Amsterdam – Faculteit der Maatschappij en Gedragswetenschappen).

    This project investigates how economic circumstances in people’s direct environment – geographic surroundings, their work places and economic sectors, and their households and families – affect their levels of political trust. The project makes a unique contribution by linking economic indicators about all these different contexts to individual-level survey data from the LISS panel. This makes it possible to analyze how economic changes in the different contexts are related to changes in individuals’ levels of political trust over time. From such analyses, we learn about the degree to which low and declining levels of political trust that we see across several democracies can be explained by economic changes in, for example, specific sectors of the economy and particular types of places. This, in turn, provides important insights for how we may potentially get out of the alleged ‘crisis of trust.

    Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash