A hidden Markov approach to reflect on the recent course of trust in the public and financial institutions of the Polish society

In Poland trust in government and parliament according to a recent Eurobarometer survey is one of the lowest among the EU member states and it is still below that observed during the pre-crisis years. The issue of trust seems to be interesting especially nowadays when Poland’s ruling party swaps prime ministers and Poles demonstrate in defense of the independence of the Polish judiciary. Since trust is a latent concept it can be only measured by the survey responses with errors. The time-fixed and the time-varying covariates allow us to better characterize how transitions accounted by a hidden Markov model of first order can occur between different levels of trust