Trust under pressure: immigration governance and institutional trust in European democracies

This article examines the relationship between immigration and political trust in European democracies during a period marked by overlapping political, economic, and geopolitical crises. Building on performance-based theories of political trust and the distinction between trust and trustworthiness, the study argues that citizens’ confidence in political institutions depends less on the salience of immigration as a political issue and more on evaluations of how effectively governments manage immigration. Using original cross-national survey data from the TRUEDEM Online Survey 2025 covering 24 European Union member states (N ≈ 29,000), the analysis combines descriptive statistics, country-level scatterplots, and Spearman rank-order correlations. The findings reveal substantial variation in institutional trust across Europe, with generally moderate to low trust levels even in long-established democracies. While the perceived importance of managing immigration displays heterogeneous and often weak associations with political trust, evaluations of national governments’ performance in managing immigration are consistently and positively correlated with trust in political institutions across all countries examined. These results provide strong support for performance-based legitimacy models and highlight the conditional nature of immigration’s i mpact on political trust. The study contributes to debates on democratic resilience by demonstrating that immigration does not inherently undermine political trust. Instead, trust is shaped by citizens’ judgments of institutional trustworthiness in addressing complex and contested policy challenges. The findings underscore the importance of effective, transparent, and accountable governance for sustaining political trust in times of crisis.