The Review of Contemporary Scientific and Academic Studies An International Multidisciplinary Online Journal www.thercsas.com ISSN: 2583-1380 Vol. 2 | Issue 9 | September 2022 Impact Factor: 4.736 (SJIF) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Trust, Vaccines and Democracy: The Situation in European Countries and the Italian Case Patrizia Laurano https://doi.org/10.55454/rcsas.2.9.2022.010 1 Trust, Vaccines and Democracy: The Situation in European Countries and the Italian Case Patrizia Laurano (patrizia.laurano@uniroma1.it ) Professor, Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Roma, Italy Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee The RCSAS (ISSN: 2583-1380) . This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). Crossref/DOI: https://doi.org/10.55454/rcsas.2.9.2022.010 Abstract: The issue of trust, a central element in modernity not only in terms of personal ties but also in terms of trust in the institutions with which we share our daily lives, has once again come to the forefront of sociological reflection on the occasion of the COVID-19 pandemic. If, in fact, in the initial phase, faced with a new and alarming phenomenon, there was a ‘honeymoon’ effect between citizens and institutions, as the months went by, doubts, criticism, protests and opposition began (resulting in part in a distrust of vaccinating against the virus). Comparing the data available for European countries, a link seems to emerge, quite clearly, between a low level of trust in institutions and a high level of vaccination hesitation, as shown by the cases of Eastern countries on the one hand and Northern European countries on the other. In this scenario, Italy plays a special role: although traditionally a country with very low levels of trust in institutions, it has a high percentage of vaccinated people that can be attributed not only to purely political elements, but also to structural data, starting with demographic ones. Keywords: COVID-19, Europe, Governmental Institutions, Italy, Trust, Vaccines What would be needed to contain the spread of the virus? More trust, among other things. - (Sgobba 2020, p.20) Modernity and Trust In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sociologists warned of the ways in which industrialization and urbanization had transformed social relations, emphasizing the individualism that had undermined communities and warning that without generalized trust, without bonds holding it together, society would disintegrate. An alarm raised by Adam Seligman (1993) in the early 1990s: if “the problem of civil society is one of synthesis between collective solidarity and individualism and their dominant definitions, then the notion of trust, in institutions and at the interpersonal level, should be dominant” (p. 190). But the notion of trust, as Simmel (1998) has already pointed out, is semantically complex and multidimensional: “trust, insofar as it constitutes a hypothesis of future behaviour that is secure enough for practical action to be based on it, is an intermediate stage between knowledge and ignorance concerning man [...] What measures of knowledge and ignorance are to be mixed in order to make a single decision based on trust possible is decided by epochs, fields of interest, individuals” (p. 299). Luhmann (1968), who reiterates how trust constitutes the glue of social life that otherwise could not exist, distinguishes between personal trust, between individuals, and systemic trust, increasing in contemporary societies and based on the certainty that the system works. The latter, in fact, acquired after repeated positive experiences of interaction with the system, is able to reduce the complexity that surrounds us and consequently orient us in our knowledge of reality. In the 1990s, Anthony Giddens identifies trust as the hallmark of modernity, of a society so dilated in space and time that it necessarily relies on reliability in “systems of technical achievement or professional competence that organize large areas in the material and social environments in which we live today” (1994, p. 37), whereby “the nature of modern institutions is deeply linked to the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems” (p. 89). The British sociologist distinguishes this type of trust from personal trust, which is usually developed between individuals who know each other and who “on the basis of prolonged acquaintance have consolidated the guarantees that make one trustworthy in the eyes of the other” (p. 88), but for the purposes of this essay only trust in institutions will be considered. Compared to pre-modernity, Giddens argues, globalization has made it impossible for individuals not to come into contact, at so-called “access nodes”, with experts or their representatives and proxies (doctors, pilots, drivers, etc.), fallible people from whom reassurance is required. It is precisely on the experiences had at access nodes (as well as cognitive updates) that the attitude of trust or mistrust shown by each of us is based. Indeed, in our daily lives, the mechanisms underlying trust seem to act automatically, habitually, and are tacitly accepted by the individual, who