Trust in modern democracies is said to be declining during the latest decades (Nye, 1997). This theme has intensely been studied by scholars in the field of psychology, sociology and especially the political sciences. The relevance of the study of trust in government is found at the basics of the democratic political system. Without trust democracy is at stake, mainly because government loses its legitimacy in the absence of trust. Without this legitimacy the government risks to lose important resources: the
willingness of the public to pay taxes might disappear together with the preparedness of bright young people to apply for jobs in government. And perhaps as important: also the willingness of the public to comply with laws might diminish when government is distrusted (Nye, 1997). This would ultimately lead to the disintegration of society as a whole. Lennard motivates the importance of the study of institutional trust as follows: ‘The voluntary compliance that is central to democracies relies on trust, along two dimensions: citizens must trust their legislators to have the national interest in mind and citizens must trust each other to abide by democratically established laws.’(Lennard, 2008: 1). A lack of trust thus can have severe consequences for governmental institutions and the political system, it leads to lower civic political participation or even the actively participation in groups that attempt to undermine the democratic system (Van Cluysen,Van Craen & Ackaert, 2009). A lack of trust hampers policy implementations and creates a favourable environment for populist and extremist political parties and movements (Neustadt, 1997). The importance of generating trust can also be confirmed by the high priority it has on the economical and political agenda (Kampen & Van de Walle, 2003). In this study attention is paid to trust in the Flemish parliament, the Flemish Government, the Belgian criminal justice system, the Belgian Federal Parliament, the Belgian Federal Government, the police, the politicians, the European Parliament and the United Nations Organisation. Especially the criminal justice system has been found several times to be very vulnerable to the loss of trust. The criminal justice system is a complex matter. Earlier research suggests that trust in the criminal justice system leads to higher compliance with the law (Tyler, 1997, 2001). Furthermore the functioning of the criminal justice system depends on the cooperation of the public to report crime to the police, to act as
a witness and to serve as a juror in a certain court case (Roberts & Hough, 2005). The perceived illegitimacy of the criminal justice system could also lead to dangerous situations in which the public takes the law in its own hands. In the descriptive part of this study, attention is paid to the proportion of Flemish citizens that trust each of the aforementioned institutions. However, in the exploratory multivariate analyses trust is treated as a single latent trait. In order to understand individual differences in trust, it is necessary to define determinants of trust and especially to uncover the mechanisms which play a central role in the creation of trust. In this study we set off from an integrated sociological and psychological perspective. This is done by combining social capital theory and social identity theory, a theory which gives an explanation for the causal interrelationship of
anomia and ethnocentrism. We try to explain individual differences in institutional trust from: a) sociological background characteristics, indicative of the social environment, b) social capital, c) anomia (political powerlessness) and d) ethnocentrism as key psychological mechanisms. This study is organized as follows: first, a series of exploratory regression models are run on two datasets for the region of Flanders in Belgium. By doing so a first insight into the role of characteristics derived from social capital and social identity theory is obtained. Second some confirmatory path analyses are performed to further understand how these characteristics have an influence on levels of trust. In order to test the stability of the results and to increase the external validity, the hypotheses are tested on two datasets. The first data are provided by the research service of the Flemish Government in Belgium, while the other data are forthcoming from the European social survey which was held in the same period in the region of Flanders.