Keywords: Challenges of comparative research and International Survey Projects, cross-cultural concerns in data collection and measurement issues

Several empirical studies have examined political trust – regarding the government, the state, politicians and political parties –in North Africa and West Asia (WANA). However, institutional trust at large, pertaining to other institutions of the civil society, international organisations, the private sector, the media, and the like, have not been examined as much. Because of its political instability – the two Gulf wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab spring and the various revolts in long-established States -- the WANA region offers a very interesting ground to study change in trust in a context of fragile democracies in countries that are often just out of totalitarianism. In this context, the research analyzes change in trust in the various political, social and economic institutions in the WANA region. It aims at understanding whether institutional trust varies with the overall national context, or following specific events, whether it depends on the specific institution that is the object of trust, or else whether it is an individual phenomenon that varies with respondents’ characteristics. Many studies have shown that trust varies much between regions (Zmerli et W.G.Van der Meer 2017; Durand, Pena Ibarra et Charest, 2016). On the contrary, we aim at examining within region variation. The data for this research comes from a combined file including all the answers to questions on institutional trust from the Arab Barometer, the Africa Barometer and the World Values Survey conducted in countries of the WANA region from 2001 to 2014. It uses a 3-level longitudinal model to analyze jointly the impact of the different factors at the institution level, the individual level and the country-year level.
Preliminary results show some heterogeneity in the region. While average institutional trust remains relatively stable in some countries, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it varies widely in other countries such as Algeria. Besides, the same applies at the institutional level. For example, trust in International and African organizations remains unchanged while trust in religious leaders declines sharply.