A common feature among populist parties and movements is their negative perspective on the media’s role in society. This paper analyzes whether citizens with a populist worldview also hold negative attitudes toward the media. From a theoretical point of view, the paper shows that both the anti-elite, anti-outgroup and people centrism dimension of populism contradicts the normative expectations toward the media. For instance, the assumption of a homogeneous people and the exclusion of a societal outgroup is incompatible with a pluralistic media coverage. The results of a representative survey in Germany predominantly confirmed a relation between a populist worldview and negative media attitudes. However, the three populism dimensions influenced the evaluations not in a consistent way. A systematic relation could only be found for antielite populism, which is negatively associated with all analyzed media evaluations such as media trust or satisfaction with the media’s performance. This indicates that in a populist worldview, the media are perceived as part of a detached elite that neglects the citizens’ interests. However, the results confirm the assumption of a natural ally between populism and tabloid or commercial media. Individuals with people centrist and anti-outgroup attitudes have higher trust in these media outlets.

The publics of different societies are characterized by durable cultural orientations that have major political and economic consequences. Throughout the period from 1973 to 1987, given nationalities consistently showed relative high or low levels of a “civic culture”—a coherent syndrome of personal life satisfaction, political satisfaction, interpersonal trust and support for the existing social order. Those societies that rank high on this syndrome are much likelier to be stable democracies than those that rank low. Economic development and cultural change are linked in a complex pattern of reciprocal influence. Originally, Protestantism may have facilitated the rise of capitalism, leading to economic development, which in turn favored the emergence of the civic culture. But in those countries that attained high levels of prosperity, there eventually emerged postmaterialist values that tended to neutralize the emphasis on economic accumulation that earlier characterized Protestant societies.

An important precondition of successful democratic consolidation is voters’ confidence that political institutions do not abuse their privileged position of power. Seeking to identify variables that explain trust in political institutions, the paper tests different theories of institutional trust with individual-level survey data from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Building on prior research, two competitive theories—the cultural and performance explanation—are identified and tested, while also controlling for the effects of party preference, ethnicity, and socio-demographic factors. The results show that both cultural and performance variables influence citizens’ trust in political institutions. In other words, institutional trust depends on how much the individual trusts other people as well as on how well they believe the economic and the political system to function. Besides cultural and performance variables, most control variables also proved to be significantly associated with institutional trust, confirming the need to include correct control variables in models of institutional trust.

Popular trust in political institutions is vital to democracy, but in post-Communist countries, popular distrust for institutions is widespread, and prospects for generating increased political trust are uncertain given disagreements over its origins. Cultural theories emphasizing exogenous determinants of trust compete with institutional theories emphasizing endogenous influences, and both can be further differentiated into micro and macro variants. Competing hypotheses drawn from these theories are tested using data from 10 post-Communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Aggregate data on economic and political performance are combined with survey data on interpersonal and political trust, political socialization experiences, and individual evaluations of national performance. Results strongly support the superiority of institutional explanations of the origins of political trust, especially micro-level explanations, while providing little support for either micro-cultural or macro-cultural explanations. This encourages cautious optimism about the potential for nurturing popular trust in new democratic institutions.

As a relatively new methodological tool, QCA is still a work in progress. Standards of good practice are needed in order to enhance the quality of its applications. We present a list from A to Z of twenty-six proposals regarding what a “good” QCA-based research entails, both with regard to QCA as a research approach and as an analytical technique. Our suggestions are subdivided into three categories: criteria referring to the research stages before, during, and after the analytical moment of data analysis. This listing can be read as a guideline for authors, reviewers, and readers of QCA.

In today’s business world, trust is an essential ingredient for business success, as it serves as a foundation for enhancing a network of positive relationships among businesses, clients, employees and stakeholders. This study aims to shed light on a deeper and more substantial understanding of trust by examining the casual association between national culture and trust.

This article explores a possible association between skepticism toward the media and audience exposure patterns. Hypotheses predicting a relationship between media skepticism and news media consumption are tested on four large sample data sets. Findings show that media skepticism is negatively associated with mainstream news exposure but positively associated with nonmainstream news exposure.

Media research demonstrates that audience trust in the news media is a highly consequential factor, shaping audience selection of and response to media, and potentially impacting citizens’ perceptions of the political system at large. Still, our knowledge about the correlates of trust in media is limited. Only a few studies have utilized a correlational design to explore the associations between trust in media and other factors, and almost all of these studies originate in the U.S. context. The current investigation utilizes data from 44 diverse countries ( n = 57,847), collected as part of the World Values Survey, to broaden our understanding of trust in media. The aim is two-fold—to learn about individual-level correlates across contexts and to demonstrate that macro-level factors play a part in shaping such trust. Our findings indicate that levels of political interest, interpersonal trust, and exposure to television news and newspapers are positively correlated with trust in media, while education and exposure to news on the Internet are negatively associated. On the macro level, postmaterialism emerged as a consistent predictor of trust in media. State ownership of the media industry did not have a main effect on trust in media after controlling for other factors. However, an interaction was found between state ownership and level of democracy: state ownership of television is positively associated with media trust in democratic societies and negatively associated with trust in media in nondemocratic societies.

We apply a multilevel approach to examine empirically the nexus between individualist and collectivist culture on the one hand and people’s radius of trust on the other. People’s trust level (i.e., the intensity with which people trust other people) has been extensively studied. Increasingly, however, researchers are seeing a need to move beyond trust level and study trust radius (i.e., the width of the circle of people among whom a certain trust level exists) as the second quintessential component of trust. Results for up to 44,845 individuals from 36 countries show, first, that we can validly apply multilevel modeling to the study of trust radius. Second, consistent with prior theoretical expectations, individualism is associated with a broader trust radius, whereas collectivism is associated with a narrower trust radius. Considering the strength of the associations found, trust radius might be best understood as an inherent part of the individualism–collectivism cultural syndrome. The key contribution of this note is to reveal how exactly individualism–collectivism relates to trust, specifically its radius. In addition, the note demonstrates the feasibility of a multilevel approach to studying trust radius with much potential for follow-up research on this most vital trust construct.

In recent years, concerns about the perceived increase in the amount of "fake news" have become prevalent in discussions about media and politics, particularly in the United States and Europe. However, debates around "fake news", even if some object to the use of the term due to it being loosely defined, appear to speak of processes that occur not only in the Global North but also elsewhere. In Africa, mis- and disinformation campaigns have been used to influence political agendas, and governments have responded with countermeasures. This article explores the phenomenon in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa using data from a two-wave online survey (N = 1847). We find that perceived exposure to disinformation is high, and that trust in social and national media is low. We also identify a significant relationship between higher levels of perceived exposure to disinformation and lower levels of media trust in South Africa. The limitations of this study, which focuses on a subset of the population that is highly educated, the implications of our findings, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Prior research has examined various correlates of media trust including media consumers’ political stands and media use, objectivity in news reports, and perceived biases stemming from journalists’ political leanings. The goal of this study is to examine community contextual sources of media trust. Data from the Japanese General Social Surveys indicate that prefecture-level structural pluralism and political heterogeneity are negatively associated with measures of media trust, independent of personal characteristics of respondents. Implications are discussed in terms of the production of media messages.