Increased trust in institutions after the elections, people trust science the most
Science and scientists enjoy the highest level of trust within institutions among voters of both the coalition and the opposition. There is a 70.4% trust in science and scientists among voters of the coalition and 84.3% among the voters of the opposition. On a national scale, it is 72.8%. This is shown by the research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University, which was published on Monday, June 24, 2024, at the SAS by Miloslav Bahna, director of the Institute for Sociology SAS, and Oľga Gyarfášová from the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava.
Extensive sociological research was carried out in February 2024 as part of the APVV project Nationalism, populism and social networks in a comparative perspective and included two modules. The topic of current research is national identity and citizenship. The second module is post-election research, which retrospectively focuses on voter behaviour in the 2023 parliamentary elections and on various aspects of the evaluation of representative democracy.
Respondents' attitudes towards six possible sources of national pride were investigated as part of the national identity research. There is a significant difference in the respondents' answers to the three potential sources of pride, which relate to the functioning of politics and the economy, and to the three apolitical sources of pride, which relate to sports, culture and history. There are no differences between voters of the coalition and the opposition in the degree of pride in Slovak history and Slovak art and literature in the long term. Opposition voters are slightly more proud of athletes' results than coalition voters. On the other hand, in the case of the political and economic characteristics of Slovakia, the views of the voters of the two main political camps differ more than in 2014. In the case of pride in economic results, there was a slight decrease this year - 27.9 percent of respondents are proud of the economic results of the Slovak Republic.
"We can say that the political polarization around topics related to national identity and attitudes towards other countries is currently the same or higher than in 1996 on some issues. Society as a whole is not well described by the metaphor of two opposing camps of opinion, and it was not well described even in the 90s," explains the director of the Institute for Sociology SAS SAS.
Normative ideas about democracy and democratic processes
Almost three-quarters of the Slovak public (74%) agree that "democracy is always and under all circumstances better than any other type of government". The agreement with the statement "courts should be able to stop the government from acting beyond its competence” is similarly high (71%), meaning that trust in the justice system as a control mechanism of the executive is high. On the other hand - as other researches have shown in the past - part of the public (41%) expresses a preference for a strong leader and agrees with the statement "having a strong leader in the government is good for Slovakia, even if the leader bends the rules to enforce what is necessary".
Detailed research reports are in the attachments.
Edited by Andrea Nozdrovická
Foto: Katarína Gáliková