Improving social stability: a democracy perception analysis in the European area

The present work aims to analyse the current perception that European citizens have of Western democracies due to an extensive empirical study. The comprehension of the way people perceive and consider their democratic institutions is a key issue in the sociological and socio-political perspectives. Having a clear understanding of this macro-issue is a fundamental stage to approach the final goal of improving social and political stability. In this context, on one hand, we will approach the problem by taking on as central the notions of institutional trust and expectations and, on the other hand, the notion of democracy itself. Specifically, we will empirically investigate the way the European citizens appreciate and evaluate the present democracies in their countries, by the means of real-life data collected by the European Social Survey. The data will be elaborated through statistical analyses, in order to answer to three specific research questions related to democracy perception, institutional trust and expectations. Finally, we will find out some peculiar evidence, tied to the anagraphical or geographical segmentations considered for the data and related to the centrality of the role of trust in the political institutions, as well as to the importance of the democracies’ instruments in the European countries considered. The next step in our work include the use of the data and the results obtained to develop predictive models of the future states of the people’s perception, due to artificial intelligence based models and agent-based simulations.