Measuring Public Trust in Institutions: Surveys, Findings, and Pitfalls

#Why measurement details matter

“Trust in institutions is collapsing” may be the most repeated empirical claim in contemporary politics. Whether it is true depends entirely on which institutions, which countries, which years and — critically — which survey. Trust questions are unusually sensitive to wording: asking whether people trust the government “to do what is right”, whether they “have confidence” in it, or whether they trust it “to use their data responsibly” yields different numbers from the same respondents.

This review documents the main measurement programmes and separates findings that replicate across them from artefacts of method. It is a companion piece to our explainer on reading statistics critically.

#The major surveys

The Pew Research Center’s long-running compilation of US polling deserves separate mention: it tracks trust in the federal government “to do what is right” back to surveys from 1958, providing one of the few six-decade trend lines in existence.

#Findings that hold up across sources

• Between-country differences are large and persistent. Across surveys, trust in public institutions is consistently higher in, for example, the Nordic countries and Switzerland than in most other high-income democracies — differences of tens of percentage points that persist across decades and survey houses.
• Local beats national in many countries. The OECD Trust Survey and national studies repeatedly find higher trust in local government and in front-line public services than in national governments and parliaments.
• The long US decline is real. Trust in the US federal government fell from roughly three-quarters of the public in the early 1960s to around one-fifth to one-quarter in recent years — a decline visible across independent survey series, with the steepest fall in the 1960s–70s.
• Institutions differ more than eras. Within most countries, the gap between the most-trusted institutions (often science, the military, or the police, depending on country) and the least-trusted (often political parties and legislatures) is larger than most changes over time.

#Methodological pitfalls

1. Cross-survey level comparisons. A 4-point confidence scale, a 0–10 scale and a binary question produce non-comparable percentages. Levels should only be compared within a survey; trends can cautiously be compared across them.
2. Trend claims from short windows. Trust measures move with elections, scandals and crises (including a widely observed temporary “rally” early in the COVID-19 pandemic). One-year movements are weather, not climate.
3. Bundling institutions. “Trust in government” often means the national executive; extending the claim to courts, civil servants or scientists is unsupported — these routinely score very differently.
4. Mode and sampling effects. Online opt-in panels, phone samples and face-to-face surveys reach different populations; changes in mode can masquerade as changes in trust.
5. Cultural response styles. Willingness to use scale extremes differs across countries, complicating fine-grained international rankings even within one survey.

#How to read a trust statistic

A defensible reading of any trust figure requires four attachments: the exact question text, the response scale (and which responses were counted as “trust”), the population and mode (who was asked, and how), and the comparison being made (same survey over time, or across countries within one wave). Claims that arrive without them — most viral charts — cannot be evaluated and should not be repeated.

#Sources and further reading

• OECD — Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions, main results reports (2022 and 2024), with full questionnaires and methodology.
• World Values Survey (worldvaluessurvey.org) — data and documentation for all waves since 1981.
• Pew Research Center (pewresearch.org) — the long-run “Public Trust in Government” series for the United States.
• Eurobarometer — the European Commission’s recurring surveys of trust in national and EU institutions.
• NORC General Social Survey — the US confidence-in-institutions series since 1972.