Improving the Limited Understanding of Social and Institutional Trust in Croatia

Generalized social trust and institutional trust are essential for a well-functioning‎ society. The former refers to the belief that people, in general, can be ‎trusted, while the latter pertains to confidence in institutions to act in ways‎ that enhance overall well-being. Understanding the predictors of trust is particularly ‎relevant in Croatia, where both social and institutional trust have ‎remained comparatively low over the past 25 years. Previous research has ‎primarily examined various socio-economic and socio-demographic factors.‎ However, these provide only a limited understanding of individual-level variations ‎in trust. Therefore, this study aims to improve our understanding of‎ trust in Croatia by incorporating novel socio-political and socio-psychological‎ concepts, such as social dominance orientation, populism, perception and justification ‎of norm breaking, and religiosity. Results show that the models of ‎predictors of trust are improved by the widening of the pool of predictors, but‎ there is still a hefty amount of unexplained variance.‎