How much do you trust the people in your local area? And the politicians in your national parliament? From October 2020 to February 2021, these were among the questions put to citizens across the 27 member states of the European Union. Their answers form the basis of the 2021 European Quality of Government Index.
Those answers were also used for these two maps by Anders Sundell, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg. He translated those levels of trust into color codes: darker green means higher, darker red is lower, and orange is meh.
Some preliminary findings:
Let’s have a closer look at both maps. First, the one showing levels of trust in other people. The question was: “On a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being ‘no confidence at all’ and 10 being ‘complete confidence’ to do the right thing, how much confidence do you personally have in other people in your area?”
So-called NUTS 2 regions — a standard subdivision used in EU statistics — with a score of 6 or higher are colored green. Relatively few countries are entirely green:
Other countries substantially or partly green include:
On the other side of the spectrum:
A few interesting regional divides:
For the second map, the question was: “On a 1 to 10 scale (…), how much confidence do you have in (your country’s) parliament?” When substituting ordinary humans for the more specialized subset of national politicians, it is striking how the general divides of the first map still apply, but it’s as if someone upset the color balance, emphasizing the reds over the greens.
Says Mr Sundell: “I used the same color scale and breaks as in this other map, to make comparisons easier. But I had to add a lower category!” Clearly, EU citizens don’t think too highly of their parliamentarian representatives.
The level of confidence is especially low in Eastern Europe:
The picture is only somewhat better in the southern part of what used to be called Western Europe:
For some reason, 5.5 out of 10 seems to be a fairly strict divider. Eighteen countries score below this level of trust, not just nationally, but for each of their regions. And eight countries have a higher score — again, not just overall, but also regionally. The only exception is Portugal, where the Lisbon Metropolitan Region scores 5.5, while the rest of the country stays between 5 and 5.5.
These maps were found on Mr Sundell’s Twitter feed. For more on this topic, go to the Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg. And check this page at the QoG Institute for some great map visualization tools for QoG data.
Strange Maps #1112
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