From Power to Opposition : How Government Position Influences Trust in Public Service Media

Trust in public service media has become increasingly contested in modern democracies, yet it remains unclear whether such trust reflects partisan identity alone or also citizens’ proximity to political power. This thesis examines how support for parties in government, external support, or opposition shapes trust in Sweden’s public service broadcaster, Sveriges Television (SVT), in order to assess whether trust in public service media follows a broader winner–loser pattern in evaluations of democratic institutions. Drawing on repeated cross-sectional survey data from the Swedish SOM Institute, the study compares levels of trust in SVT across party supporters and institutional positions over time and estimates these relationships using regression analysis with demographic controls and year fixed effects. The results show a limited government advantage: supporters of governing parties report somewhat higher trust in SVT than opposition supporters, while support-party voters do not form a clear intermediate category. At the same time, the analysis shows that this institutional effect weakens when party composition is taken into account, since supporters of the Sweden Democrats consistently express markedly lower trust than other groups. The thesis therefore concludes that proximity to power matters, but that long-term partisan attachments appear more important for explaining variation in trust in SVT.