Abstract

This study examines the determinants of trust in politics and trust in institutions using data from the OECD 2023 survey “Building trust to reinforce democracy”. In the first step, we conduct a confirmatory factor analysis to validate the latent constructs of trust in politics, trust in institutions, trust in statistics, and perceived quality of governance. The confirmatory model demonstrates strong factor loadings, providing a robust measurement framework for subsequent analysis. Building on this foundation, we use factor scores in multilevel regression models to assess how individual- and country-level determinants shape political and institutional trust. Trust in official statistics consistently emerges as one important predictor, ceteris paribus. Individuals who perceive public statistics as trustworthy, accessible and useful are more likely to express higher trust in institutions and politics. At macrolevel, Institutional trust is determined by GDP, political stability, and corruption intensity. These findings suggests that trust in statistics deserves to be heeded by safeguarding independence and transparency of the statistical system. Quality of governance, political stability and economic performance have a positive bearing on trust in institutions and politics, supporting democracy to some extent.