Schmidt Gives Keynote Address for Political Trust Conference
Professor Vivien Ann Schmidt gave the opening keynote address, titled Political Trust and Legitimacy in the Age of Populism, for the Political Trust conference, organized by CEVIPOF at the French Political Science School at Sciences Po in Paris on December 5, 2025. This year’s conference, named Political Trust: A Challenge for Democracies, brought together researchers from across Europe and North America to explore the causes, consequences, and possible remedies to the crisis of trust that increasingly undermines democratic systems today. Through keynote lectures, panel discussions, and the presentation of CEVIPOF’s Political Trust Barometer, the conference engaged political scientists in a shared reflection on a central question: how can democratic legitimacy be renewed in an age of populism, distrust, and digital transformation?
Although political trust is central to theories of democracy and governance, empirical studies often leave it undefined. Legitimacy is often an accompanying term, but the relationship between it and political trust is often under-specified. In this keynote talk, Schmidt reviewed the conceptualizations of both terms and their interrelationships, arguing that the two terms similarly refer to both a somewhat static, foundational acceptance of a governing authority and more dynamic assessments of governing authorities’ activities in terms of policy performance, political responsiveness, and/or procedural quality. She then went on to consider the loss of trust and legitimacy signaled by the rise of populist anti-system politics that have accompanied successive crises and emergency politics, in particular with regard to the 2010s economic crisis and the 2020s Covid-19 pandemic.
Vivien Ann Schmidt is a Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration, Professor Emerita of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, and Professor Emerita of Political Science, as well as the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Europe, all at Boston University where she taught from 1998 to 2023. An authority on European politics and society, the European Union, and France, she has written several books including Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (2020) which received the Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association’s Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section. Her upcoming publication by Oxford University Press, The Power of Ideas and Discourse in Political Analysis: A Discursive Institutionalist Perspective, will be available in April 2026. To learn more about her work and accomplishments, visit her faculty profile.