Essays on political trust and economic opportunities

Political trust, social cohesion, and equal opportunities are essential elements for stable and fair democracies. In the last few decades, however, Europe has gone through major economic and social changes that have challenged these principles. Repeated economic crises have increased inequality, while the fast development of digital technologies has changed the way citizens receive and share political information. As these two forces interact, leading to more polarization and growing distrust toward democratic institutions, understanding how different means of information and socioeconomic conditions may affect public confidence is therefore crucial for building more resilient and inclusive societies. This thesis attempts to study these issues by examining the links between information, inequality, and opportunity as key factors behind political trust. The three chapters approach this question from different perspectives, proposing both methodological tools and empirical analyses to explore individual and societal dimensions of trust. The first chapter examines how the use of the Internet has influenced political trust in Italy between 2014 and 2022. Using individual-level data, it explores the relationship between online political information and citizens’ confidence in political institutions, finding a robust negative association. However, this link is not uniform: while exposure to social media, where misinformation is often widespread, tends to lower political trust, the use of online newspapers appears to be associated with higher confidence in institutions. These patterns illustrate the dual role of digital media in shaping political attitudes and raise important questions about the long-term effects of online information on democratic stability. Driven by these long-term concerns, the second chapter turns to the structural dimension of trust, examining how socioeconomic inequality affect confidence in supranational institutions across Europe. To analyze these patterns, it introduces a non-parametric tool, the Trust Dynamics Curve (TDC), which measures changes in political trust across different social groups in an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of approaches based on categorical variables. In parallel, the chapter proposes a normative framework to understand the welfare implications of trust dynamics and to assess how major economic shocks have influenced different segments of the population. Within this framework, it also compares two alternative criteria for examining welfare dynamics across socioeconomic groups: one based on income inequality and the other on inequality of opportunity. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), the analysis underlines that economic disparities and background circumstances play a key role in explaining variations in trust and reveal distinct patterns across different groups. As the discussion in Chapter 2 leaves open debate about the relationship between income inequality and fairness considerations, and how these two dimensions may shape political trust in different ways, the third chapter shifts the focus to the literature on equality of opportunity, proposing an individual measure grounded in this framework. Specifically, Chapter 3 proposes a measure of individual Sensitivity to Effort, designed to capture how much people can influence their economic outcomes given their initial circumstances. Building on Roemer’s Identification Assumption (RIA), the measure represents the local steepness of the inverse cumulative distribution function (CDF) for type-specific income distributions, which is estimated using adaptive kernel density methods. When applied to the first wave of the UK Understanding Society dataset, the results show substantial variation within types, offering a new perspective on fairness within society. Taken together, the three studies offer a comprehensive view of how digital information, social inequality, and individual effort shape trust and opportunity in today’s democracies. By combining empirical analysis with theoretical discussion, the thesis attempts to better understand the factors that strengthen or weaken people’s confidence in institutions and offers ideas to help restore it.