PROTRUST · Public Trust in Contemporary Europe: Trusting the Antitrust (PROTRUST)
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2024-05-01 → 2026-04-30
- EU contribution
- €226,751
- Participants
- 3
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Public Trust in Contemporary Europe: Trusting the Antitrust (PROTRUST)
The PROTRUST project investigates how the politicisation of EU antitrust enforcement affects citizens’ trust in the European Commission and in large digital firms. PROTRUST combines media analysis and experimental research to examine how public discourse and trust outcomes are linked. The project advances academic knowledge on the politicisation of EU competition policy by linking media framing and citizens’ trust in regulatory institutions. In order to contribute to research on politicisation, trust, and regulatory governance, PROTRUST combines claims-making analysis with original survey experiments. The project generated several peer-reviewed outputs and conference presentations, including two additional publications beyond those foreseen in the DoA. These outputs strengthen the project’s scientific impact by extending existing theories of politicisation and framing into the domain of antitrust and digital platform regulation. The results of PROTRUST have implications for EU policymakers as they highlight the conditions under which regulatory communication may foster or undermine public trust. In particular, the findings show that emotional language by regulatory actors like the European Commission affects how regulatory messages are received and shared by citizens, which is relevant for public-facing communication strategies. These insights will also be disseminated through policy-oriented outputs, including a policy brief to be published in 2027.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Large firms such as Amazon, Google and Facebook have been making worldwide headlines for abusing their market power and violating antitrust rules. Within the European Union (EU), the European Commission (EC) has been a regulatory powerhouse in competition policy with the capacity to counterbalance unfair dominance of large firms. Such antitrust cases tend to gain news coverage and lead to discussions in the public sphere. In other words, they become subject to ‘politicisation’. But does politicisation affect citizens’ trust in public authorities and large companies, and if so, how? PROTRUST (Public Trust in Contemporary Europe: Trusting the Antitrust) investigates the effect of politicisation of EU antitrust cases on citizens’ trust in the European Commission and in the firms involved. It does so through an innovative combination of (1) a claims-making analysis of media coverage of antitrust cases in selected countries and (2) survey experiments based on the identified media frames from the claims-making analysis. PROTRUST is hosted by ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, where it benefits from the expertise of Prof. Tobias Bach and other academics in the areas of trust, public administration, and EU studies. It also relies on the support of two secondment institutions, GOVTRUST Centre of Excellence, University of Antwerp, and Lund University, adding key expertise in the areas of political economy, transparency and technology. PROTRUST builds a bridge between politicisation and trust research, advances knowledge on politicisation in the field of competition policy, and provides a novel analysis of the impact of media frames in relation to competition and antitrust. Considering the dominance of large firms and the emerging challenges of democratic governance in the digital age, analysing the link between politicisation and citizens’ trust is a timely and pressing topic.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101110738
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e513f1e115&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5272e85a6&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union