Paulína Tabery

Paulína Tabery has been involved in public opinion research for more than 15 years. She is currently head of the Public Opinion Research Centre at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She leads grant projects and helps clients from the academic and public sphere implement their projects, from designing questionnaires, data collection, and writing research reports. Her academic work focuses on opinion formation, trust, interpersonal and media communication, survey instrument testing, and pre-election surveys. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as IJPOR and European Societies and is currently serving as the national representative of WAPOR for the Czech Republic. She popularizes surveying and opinion polling as a regular guest on a public broadcasting radio program devoted to contemporary Czech society.

Trust, distrust, and something in between: resilience in an (un)trusting society

Trust is considered by social scientists to be the cornerstone of democratic societies, enabling them to function and ensuring their resilience in crises. The world has recently witnessed a decline in trust in institutions. In the Czech Republic, during the covid-19 pandemic, the decline in confidence in state representatives was pervasive and cited many times as a reason for the failure to cope with the crisis. If trust is so fundamental to the functioning of democracy, can Czech society continue to function democratically and cope with the challenges ahead, even with low levels of trust? And what are the lessons for future crises? This paper will focus on the empirical measurement of trust during the pandemic, presenting the dynamics of changing trust in institutions and the structure of trust. Based on this, it will discuss new directions in trust research, the implications for democratic societies, and their ability to manage crises.