TiGRE for better Trust in Governance and Regulation in Europe – quality of democracy matters!

The EU-funded project TiGRE announces the launch of a large-scale survey to assess trust relationships between a wide range of actors involved in regulatory regimes, with the aim to study their drivers and impacts.

Citizens and public authorities need to trust regulatory regimes that their interests are safeguarded in terms of data and privacy protection, financial stability or product safety for instance. An optimal level of trust is required for the well-functioning of regulatory regimes, which operate across different levels of governance for carrying out regulatory policies. TiGRE investigates under which conditions regulatory regimes are trusted by analysing the relationships between the involved actors.

Since the project start in January 2020, TiGRE has analysed the structure of regulatory regimes in three high value sectors (Food Safety, Finance and Communication & Data protection) at different levels of governance (regional, national and European). TiGRE has performed a mapping of all involved public and private stakeholders in order to list a large number of potential respondents to the large-scale survey to be launched in October 2020. A questionnaire has been developed as a measurement tool for trust in regulatory governance, applicable in various contexts (countries, sectors, stakeholders). The reference questionnaire has been translated into 8 different national languages by TiGRE partners.

The large-scale survey aims at depicting trust relationships in the considered regulated sectors and regulatory regimes. Powerful statistical analysis should reveal the drivers of trust dynamics within regulatory governance and the impacts of trust on the functioning of regulatory regimes.

Gaining insight into trust patterns is crucial to provide policy-makers and stakeholders with recommendations and tools to optimize trust in governance and improve the quality of democracy in the long term.

The TiGRE consortium comprises nine top-level universities and research centres and one SME, from nine different countries, bringing together a set of excellent international scholars with complementary and interdisciplinary competences. SCIPROM has been involved in TiGRE to accompany and support the project since the proposal preparation phase. We now contribute our management and communication expertise.

For more info on TiGRE, please visit the TiGRE website at https://www.tigre-project.eu.

The TiGRE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870722.