ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1389088
Quality of Schooling and Political Trust Amongst Students
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Comparative Politics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
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Political trust is a fundamental component of democratic stability, yet its relationship with the quality of schooling remains underexplored. This study examines how both student-level perceptions of schooling-measured through distributive justice, procedural fairness, and functional effectiveness-and national-level investment in education influence political trust across 22 European countries. Using data from Round 2 of the European Social Survey ( 2004) and national-level education expenditure from the World Bank (2004Bank ( -2006)), this study employs multilevel modeling to assess the impact of schooling quality on political trust. The results reveal that students' perceptions of distributive justice, procedural fairness and functional effectiveness significantly impact political trust, alongside national-level spending in education. These findings highlight the role of education in shaping political attitudes and suggest that government commitment to educational quality can enhance trust in political institutions. The study offers important implications for policymakers, particularly in the context of ongoing debates on education privatization and public investment in schooling.
Keywords: Political trust, Quality of Schooling, micro-performance, Macro-performance, Multilevel Analysis
Received: 20 Feb 2024; Accepted: 01 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hassan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bilal Hassan, Department of Comparative Politics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
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