The "Earning and Learning" of Young People's Trust in Institutions: Interrogating Youth Policy

The years since the World Values Survey began in 1981 are also those during which ‘youth policy’ has been institutionalised. In Ireland, for example, the inaugural European Values Study (launched the same year) fed into the first major national research and policy report on youth (National Youth Policy Committee 1984). The White Paper In Partnership with Youth (1985) was branded as the Irish government’s flagship contribution to the first ever United Nations International Youth Year (the UN’s ‘IYY’ logo featured on the White Paper’s cover alongside the official national symbol of the harp). And like EVS and WVS, the institutionalisation of youth policy has continued and in some ways deepened - at national, European and international levels - in the decades since.

The coinciding timelines, and the negative trend in research findings regarding young people’s trust in institutions, prompt obvious questions. Since research suggests that young people rely on an ‘earned-through-performance’ model of trust (Rundle et al 2012) it makes sense to ask whether the implementation (or not) of youth policy initiatives and commitments over the years has been ‘trust-building’. Models of trust (and ‘truster-trustee’ relationships) highlight both rational and emotional qualities of trusters (e.g. young people) and ‘situational factors’ such as the integrity, reliability and predictability of trustees (e.g. policy-makers/public institutions) (Hurley 2006). How has public policy on youth measured up in terms of key drivers of trust such as empathy, authenticity and logic ( Frei & Morriss 2020)? A flourishing democracy would require that it performs well on all three; otherwise successive cohorts of young people actively learn to distrust the institutions that claim to have their interests at heart.

This contribution will take Ireland as a case study but also refer to youth policy contexts and developments (and research including EVS/WVS) in Europe and internationally.