This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
Norway had the highest share of respondents who trust their national government at over six in ten (63.8%), while Colombia had the lowest at two in ten (20.5%), and in Ireland, it was just over half (50.6%). One in three (34.8%) UK respondents trust their national government.
In most countries that participated in the survey, trust in local government is higher than trust in national government. In Norway, Finland, and Ireland the reverse is true, where the share of respondents who trust the national government is higher than the share who trust local government.
In all countries, trust levels in political parties were relatively low, and in four countries (Colombia, France, Latvia, and Ireland) the percentage of respondents who trust their national government is more than double the percentage who trust political parties.
Finland had the highest percentage of respondents who trust the police at 87.0% and Colombia had the lowest at 30.4%, while in Ireland, 75.4% trust the police, over ten percentage points higher than the rate for the UK (64.9%).
With the exceptions of Japan, Norway, and the UK, a higher percentage of respondents trust the police than the percentage who trust the courts and legal system.
More than three in four (77.6%) respondents in Ireland trust most people, a similar rate to Norway and Iceland. The Netherlands had the highest percentage of respondents who trust most people (82.9%).
Overall, trust levels in the news media are low with only two countries (Netherlands and South Korea) where more than half of respondents trust the news media. In Ireland four in ten (41.7%) respondents trust the news media.
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.
Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (14 July 2022) issued intercountry results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) ‘Trust Survey’.
Commenting on today’s publication, Gerry Reilly, Senior Statistician, in the Income, Wealth and Consumptions (ICW) Division, said:
“Ireland was one of 22 participant countries in the 2021 round of the OECD’s ‘Trust Survey’ . The other participant countries were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland[1], France, Iceland, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The Trust Survey monitors people’s self-reported interpersonal trust and trust in different institutions and levels of government across OECD countries. Respondents to the survey were asked to rate their trust levels on a 0-10-point scale from ‘0 Not at all’ to ‘10 Completely’. The OECD reports 6-10 scores as ‘trusting’. The CSO published national results of the Trust Survey on 24 March 2022 and the OECD published some intercountry results in Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy: Main Findings from the OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions on 13 July 2022.
Trust in National Government
The OECD reported a trust in government level for 20 out of 22 of the survey participant countries. In 15 out of 20 countries, less than half of respondents trust their national government. Of EU participant countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden), Finland had the highest and Latvia the lowest percentage of respondents who trust their national governments (61.5% and 24.5% respectively). In Ireland, half (50.6%) of respondents trust their national government, a similar rate to Iceland and the Netherlands. One in three (34.8%) UK respondents trust their national government.
Trust in Local Government
In most countries that participated in the survey, trust in local government is higher than trust in national government. For example, almost half (47.6%) of respondents to the French survey trust their local government which is almost 20 percentage points higher than the percentage (28.1%) who trust their national government. In Norway, Finland, and Ireland the reverse is true, where the share of respondents who trust the national government is higher than the share who trust local government. In Ireland the percentage of respondents who trust their local government (45.2%) is 5.4 percentage points lower that the percentage who trust the national government (50.6%).
Trust in Political Parties
In all countries, trust levels in political parties were relatively low. In four countries (Colombia, France, Latvia, and Ireland) the percentage of respondents who trust their national government is more than double the percentage who trust political parties. The absolute difference between the percentage of respondents who trust their national government and the percentage who trust political parties in their country was largest in Ireland at 26 percentage points (50.6% compared with 24.6%).
Trust in the Police
In most countries a higher percentage of respondents trust the police than the percentage who trust courts and legal system. The exceptions are Japan, Norway, and the UK where the rates for trust in the courts and legal system are marginally higher than the trust rates in the police. In Ireland the rate for trust in police is more than seven percentage points higher than the rate for trust in the courts and legal system (75.4% and 68.1% respectively). The percentage of respondents who trust the courts and legal system is the same in Ireland and the UK (both at 68.1%).
Trust in People
Of the 18 countries for which the OECD reported a trust in people score, the Netherlands had the highest percentage of respondents who trust most people (82.9%) and Latvia had the lowest (58.4%). More than three in four (77.6%) respondents in Ireland trust most people, a similar rate to Norway and Iceland.
Trust in the Civil Service
Trust levels in the civil service are highest in Iceland, Luxembourg, and Ireland where two in three respondents (almost 68% in each of these three countries) trust the civil service and lowest in Colombia where one in five (19.9%) respondents trust the civil service. The share of UK respondents that indicated trust in the civil service was 55.5%.
Trust in News Media
Overall, trust levels in the news media are low with only two countries (Netherlands and South Korea) where more than half of respondents trust the news media. In Ireland four in ten (41.7%) respondents trust the news media. Of EU participant countries Austria and France had the lowest trust in news media, where approximately one in four respondents trust the news media (26.9% and 27% respectively). In the UK one in three (32.5%) trust the news media.”
[1] Data collection in Finland took place in 2020.