Institutional Trust and Media Use in Times of Cultural Backlash: A Cross-National Study in Nine European Countries

The TRUEDEM project team invites you to attend the next webinar in the series dedicated to political trust research. In this webinar, our invited speaker, Marc Verboord from Erasmus University Rotterdam, will examine how institutional trust is shaped by both “cultural backlash” and media use across nine European countries. Drawing on representative 2021 survey data, the analysis highlights the interplay between values, political engagement, and patterns of news consumption, offering comparative insights into the drivers of trust in politics, media, and science. The webinar will take place today, on Wednesday, October 08, at 13:00 UTC. Learn more about the TRUEDEM webinar series here.

This analysis contributes to the study of institutional trust by making a connection to “cultural backlash” theory and analyzing more recent forms of news consumption. We examine how trust in politics, media, and science is shaped by “cultural backlash” and media use in nine European countries. We employ representative survey data collected in 2021 in Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom as part of a large European research project. The results suggest that both exogenous (or “cultural”) and endogenous (or “institutional”) dimensions of cultural backlash matter for explaining institutional trust. Trust benefits from progressive–liberal values and less ideological extremism, but is hindered by discontentment with societal developments and political disengagement. Using public television is positively, and social media negatively associated with trust. While we find distinctions across institutions, there is huge consistency across countries [read full paper here].

Marc Verboord is professor of Media and Society at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC), Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research is situated at the intersection of cultural and media sociology, communication science, and journalism studies. His expertise concerns sociological aspects of media consumption, societal impacts of digitalization and new media, media and trust, and cultural legitimation. He has published in more than 40 peer-reviewed scholarly journals including American Sociological Review, New Media & Society, American Behavioral Scientist, Information, Communication & Society, European Sociological Review, European Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Poetics, International Journal of Press/Politics, and PLOS One. He is member of the Editorial board of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts, for which he served as co-Editor-in-Chief between 2015 and 2021. He teaches in the International BA in Communication and Media (IBCoM), the MA Media Studies and the research master Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts. Between 2020 and 2023, he served as head of the department of Media & Communication at ESHCC. In 2018 he was visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen in the department of Media, Cognition and Communication.