About the project
TiGRE provides an encompassing and coherent analytical framework for the study of trust relationships in governance. It studies trust among actors of regulatory regimes, such as regulators, political, administrative and judicial bodies, the regulated industries, service providers and their interest organisations, consumers and other societal interests, as well as citizens at large.
TiGRE opens thereby new research directions within the tradition of studies of trust relationships between citizens and public authorities. TiGRE’s aim is to reveal the role of trust and distrust in European regulatory governance and the ways trust can be maintained, enhanced, repaired and nurtured via administrative practices and reforms. It takes a multilevel governance approach, which includes the EU level as well as the national and regional ones. Trust – both as a precondition and a consequence of well-functioning regulatory regimes – is a key factor to be considered in order to capture how these regimes are able to produce effective and legitimate governance. The in-depth investigation of the complex interplay between trust configurations and regulation in different regulatory regimes (finance, food safety, communication and data protection) across levels of governance and in several countries requires the joint effort of experts with wide-ranging experience. TiGRE is run by a tightly integrated multidisciplinary consortium of top-level scholars, who bring together a very broad range of theoretical, substantial, and methodological skills. A cutting-edge mixed-method approach is applied to provide a comprehensive understanding of such multi-faceted trust-related processes. To bridge research with policy and practice, TiGRE provides criteria, indicators and early warning mechanisms for detecting decreasing trust, and scenarios on consequences thereof. They will be validated through interaction with stakeholders and compared with evidence from outside the EU.
Partner universities
- Université de Lausanne, Martino Maggetti
- Universiteit Antwerpen, Koen Verhoest
- Insitut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionalis, Fundacio Privada, Jacint Jordana
- The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, David Levi-Faur
- German University of Administrative Sciences, Michael Bauer
- Aarhus University, Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen
- University of Oslo, Tobias Bach and Jarle Trondal
- Utrecht University, Judith van Erp
- Akademia Leona Kozminskiego, Anna Pikos
- SciProm Sarl, Kirsten Leufgen
ARENA's role in the project
ARENA and Principal Investigator Tobias Bach have a special responsibility for designing and carrying out a large-scale survey in collaboration with the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD). The objective is to empirically assess the overall level and the nature of trust and distrust in regulatory governance from the perspective of stakeholders involved in three regulatory regimes (finance, food safety, communications and data protection) at the EU level, and in the investigated countries Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Israel. Further, the survey will identify the determinants of patterns and variation of trust and distrust between these stakeholders.
