Institutions matter: the impact of the covid‐19 pandemic on the political trust of young Europeans

In this paper we study the short run evolution of political trust during the recentcovid-19 pandemic using survey data for a sample of young individuals living in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. In particular, we analyze whether pre-pandemic perceptions and experiences of citizens about various dimensions of local governments and institutions quality had any mediating effect on the evolution of political trust after the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. The results show a relative increase in political trust of about 9% in regions with high institutional quality (75th percentile) compared to regions with low institutional quality (25th percentile) over the period 2019 - 2020