Abstract
The study elaborates knowledge of former communist societies regarding attitudes to police. The analysis is aimed at empirical comparison of potential endogenous and exogenous sources of trust in the police in four central European post-communist countries: the Czech Republic (N = 2386), the Slovak Republic (N = 1856), Poland (N = 1751) and Hungary (N = 1561).
With data from European Social Survey 2011, we checked for the relative importance of institutional and socio-cultural explanations of trust. Based on life-time learning model and results of another Czech survey, we expected a substantial role of both institutional (such as perceived police effectiveness and fairness) and socio-cultural variables (such as trust in others, personal morality, religion, political orientation, income, gender, age, education) in explaining trust.
The results reveal significant and consistent role of perceived police performance, fairness being stronger predictor than effectiveness. Overall, socio-cultural variables explain trust slightly more than perceived police performance.
However, it seems that only trust in others is a common socio-cultural predictor of trust in the police across the four countries, while personal morality and income play a minor role in some of them. Religion, education or political orientation seem to not have any separate impact on trust in the police.
The findings are discussed in the context of similar analysis of European democracies of the First wave.