Are Democracies Loosing Young People?

The World Values Survey has measured, among many things, the development of institutional trust across decades. It is particularly striking that young people have come to trust core institutions of democratic societies less and less over time. Between 1989 and 2023, the trust that young people extend to governments, parliaments, and political parties, has deteriorated and is now below 20% of all young people.

Wih our contribution, we will explore young people's diminishing trust in core democratic institutions over time. We will contrast the development over time as documented by the World Values Survey with other global surveys and indices to demonstrate that young people loosing trust in democratic institutions is a misleading narrative: it is much rather democratic institutions squandering the trust young people had placed in them.