YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

178 Political trust (including institutional trust or political support) is also associated with psychological participation. This concept shows the lev- el of trust a person has in a political system, policy, or political institu- tion (Nygård and Jakobsson, 2013, 70). Although electoral confidence was said not to have an effect political participation, Hetherington (1999) showed that declining political confidence affects choices in elections, as voters with low political confidence support candidates who are not currently in office. Bélanger and Nadeau (2005) further demonstrate that declining trust acts more as a motivation for voters to support third, alternative parties, while mistrust significantly affects voter turnout. The results of the Mladina survey show that trust among young people towards various political institutions and politics in general is very low. Thus, e.g., holders of political power (i.e. the President of the State, the Prime Minister, the President of the National Assembly) enjoy slightly higher levels of trust, but still this trust is low and distributed in the direction of distrust. The situation is even worse in the case of politics in general and political parties in particular, where it is noticeable that mistrust is very high and that only a handful of people show at least slightly higher levels of trust in political parties and politicians in gen- eral. On this basis, we can conclude that trust in politics is also a very poor precondition for an appropriate level of young people’s political participation. Survey among young people show that trust towards various political institutions and politics in general is very low.