Political attitudes and trust in big tech companies: a cross-European analysis of citizens’ confidence in GAFAM

Abstract

This thesis examines how political attitudes shape citizens’ trust in Big Tech companies across the European Union. Big Tech companies influence communication, access to information and political life, thus understanding how citizens evaluate these firms has become an important political question. Previous research has looked at trust in digital corporations through consumer behaviour. This thesis analyses trust in Big Tech from a political science perspective. The theoretical framework is built on the idea that political trust extends to the public sphere. It focuses on three predictors: left-right ideological self-placement, satisfaction with democracy, and trust in political institutions. The dependent variable is a composite index of trust in five GAFAM companies – Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Microsoft. The analysis uses cross-national survey data from 15 EU member states and over 22,000 respondents, collected in Autumn 2024 as part of the Horizon Europe INCA project (Ehin et al., 2024). The empirical analysis includes Pearson correlation analysis, OLS regression with and without sociodemographic and country-level controls, a moderation analysis, and country-specific regressions.