The current report is an analytical account of the state of the public’s perception of governance, between 2008 and 2015, in the European Union and in EU Member States (EU MS). It considers public integrity as well as general trust and is a test of basic explanations as well as a hopeful attempt to offer an alternative approach which will allow more objective monitoring of governance. The main argument here is that economic performance alone does not explain the perceptible decline in trust, although it certainly renders Europeans more aware of how they are governed and more sensitive to it. Reduced trust reflects what Europeans in many member states perceive as both a decline in the quality of governance and the failure of current policies to redress it. Only in a minority of countries in present-day Europe we do encounter a clear majority who believe that success in either of the public or private sectors is due to merit. More than fifty per cent of all Europeans now believe that the only way to succeed in business in their country is by exploiting political connections, with only something fewer than a quarter of all Europeans agreeing that their government’s efforts to tackle corruption are effective. The countries where citizens perceive higher integrity and better governance are those which have managed to preserve high levels of trust despite the economic crisis.
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