Bulgarians persistently mistrust institutions

Bulgarians persistently mistrust institutions

Trust subsides down to a close circle of family and friends, while the public sphere is perceived as alien, unreliable, and potentially threatening


The EVS reveals an alarming picture of persistent mistrust toward social institutions and people in general. Such levels of mistrust suggest a traumatic social experience, which has stabilized into a cultural norm. The good news is that in the last ten years, trust in institutions has grown, with the exception of media. This shows that people have a realistic perception of the degeneration of press freedom in Bulgaria.

The culture of familism that dominates the minds of Bulgarians and permeates social interactions, is exceptionally resilient. The social world of Bulgarians can be described as a system of concentric circles of decreasing trust, at the center of which stands the family. The periphery is populated by strangers, foreigners and institutions. The high level of trust toward family members correlates with data about the growing significance of marriage and children. The trust toward people from the neighborhood is low, which betrays the disintegration of territorial communities.

The structure of social capital (the distribution of trust in the community) predetermines the deep divide between private and public life. Trust subsides down to a close circle of family and friends, while the public sphere is perceived as alien, unreliable, and potentially threatening. In a social world of similar construction, people are compelled to create informal networks for a reciprocal exchange of favors, in order to cope with the challenges of life. The maintenance of such networks requires constant effort and investment, and that becomes ever more difficult and ineffective in the conditions of a changing macro-environment, the complexity of which continuously increases.

The modest shift of the past ten years marks the slow and difficult recovery from a state of deep mistrust, alienation, and social atomization. The prevalent attitudes remain far away from the values of liberal open societies. It seems that the Bulgarian society is trying to solve the problems of late modernity in a globalized world through the explanatory constructs and life strategies inherited from traditional culture.

* Haralan Aleksandrov, Ph.D., New Bulgarian University

The EVS reveals an alarming picture of persistent mistrust toward social institutions and people in general. Such levels of mistrust suggest a traumatic social experience, which has stabilized into a cultural norm. The good news is that in the last ten years, trust in institutions has grown, with the exception of media. This shows that people have a realistic perception of the degeneration of press freedom in Bulgaria.

The culture of familism that dominates the minds of Bulgarians and permeates social interactions, is exceptionally resilient. The social world of Bulgarians can be described as a system of concentric circles of decreasing trust, at the center of which stands the family. The periphery is populated by strangers, foreigners and institutions. The high level of trust toward family members correlates with data about the growing significance of marriage and children. The trust toward people from the neighborhood is low, which betrays the disintegration of territorial communities.

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