Survey reveals higher trust leads to increased citizen engagement demands, highlighting a gender gap.
Abstract Trust acts as both a social clue and an alternative governance mechanism that operates partly by increasing confidence in other partners’ commitment to a greater good. From April to July 2020, we surveyed 7,729 individuals, broadly representative for age and gender, in four European regions. Our results highlight that trust indicators like transparency and trust in regional organizations significantly drive citizen demands to be engaged in policymaking: the greater the trust, the higher the demand for engagement. At the same time, citizen engagement increases trust. Thus, the greater the correlation between trust and citizen engagement for tackling grand societal challenges, the greater the value for all. However, despite indicating higher levels of trust in regional organizations, women do not demand greater engagement in regional policymaking. This gender gap calls for careful engagement strategies by policymakers to increase the equity and effectiveness of policy interventions for tackling grand societal challenges.
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Fellnhofer et al. (2025) studied this question.
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