engleski

Political trust formation among youth in Croatia

The paper aims to answer how political trust forms among young people especially regarding the considerable decrease of the level of youth’s political trust since 2000’s in Croatia. Although young people have limited (direct) experience with political system’s functioning, some studies indicate that political trust is formed by the age of 14 and stays relatively stable during maturation (Hooghe and Wilkenfeld 2008, Claes, Hooghe and Marien 2012) which additionally points to social importance of studying political trust among youth. Political trust can be defined as evaluative and affective relation towards institutional policies (Netjes 2005, Segatti 2008) and it reflects political trustworthiness and credibility of functioning of political institutions. Political trust is operationalized by trust in government, parliament and political parties which are used as dependent variables in multiple regression analysis. The intention is to find out how various factors contribute to political trust formation. Taking into account youth’s political (self)marginalization and distancing from formal politics it is argued that political trust is influenced by their political efficacy, political interest and relation towards politics and contextual factors such as satisfaction with democracy, perception of social incivility (corruption, nepotism) and trust in media. The results point to stronger influence of contextual factors on political trust, however depending on the type of political trust there are variations in proportion of variance explained. The paper relies on empirical research conducted in 2013 in Croatia on nationally representative sample of youth aged 15-29 (N=2000).

political trust, political efficacy, political (self)marginalization, democracy, youth, Croatia.

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