Between Beliefs and Truth: A Cross-National Study of Individuals’ Trust in Universities and the Church

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 1. Challenges to Academia/Higher Education

Abstract

Over the course of the twentieth century, universities have become central institutions in modern society. Yet this institutional dominance of higher education is no longer secure. The recent attacks on universities reflect a broader illiberal trend worldwide, in which liberal norms of democracy, rights, freedom—as well as science as a legitimate form of knowledge—are under growing strain (Börzel et al., 2024; Ikenberry, 2020). Within this changing global context, we use data from the World Values Survey to examine how public trust in universities across 50 countries has shifted over the past decade, and what factors are linked with individuals’ confidence in higher education as an institution. Comparing universities and the church—and individuals’ confidence in them—provides insight into how macro-social forces shape the micro-foundations of two contrasting cultural institutions that undergird changes in world society (Hadler & Symons, 2018). As universities and the church embody competing institutional scripts of scientific rationality and religious authority, respectively, examining public trust in both institutions allows us to distinguish between factors that shape confidence across institutional domains and those specific to one type of authority. Our dependent variables measure respondents’ confidence in universities and in the church (or an equivalent organized religious institution in the local context). We conduct multilevel mixed-effects linear regression models with individuals nested within countries. Overall, the findings indicate that public trust in universities and the church reflects the competing institutional logics of scientific rationality and religious authority, as established in prior literature. At the same time, general confidence in collective, organized societal structures appears to support trust in both types of institutions. Despite their embedding in competing institutional logics, the broad erosion of people’s trust in institutions at large (Kamens 2019) may thus turn out to be the biggest contemporary threat to both university and church.

Authors

• Minju Choi, WZB Social Science Research Centre

• Yasemin Soysal, Berlin Social Science Center, WZB

• Julia C. Lerch, University of California-Irvine