About half of all Russians do not trust any significant cluster of institutions. This distrust, as noted above, is the major obstacle to the emergence of a healthy civil society in which representative institutions link the interests of individuals and families with the action of government.

One camp of sociologist believes that it is the legitimacy of the system that is important for the effectiveness of democracy. This legitimacy approach holds that the higher is the percentage of “solid democrats”, i.e. people supporting democracy, the more efficient the democracy is. The correlation coefficient between these two variables, according to Welzel (2002), equals to 0.597, which indicates a rather strong relationship.
The data for years 1995-98 reveal Eastern European nations with support for democracy ranging from only 14-17% in case of Albania or Russia to almost 70% in Croatia, Czech republic, Slovakia and Hungary. In between lay: Slovenia, former Yugoslavia with 55-60% of solid democrats, Estonia (50%), Latvia, Bosnia, Romania (40-45%) to Moldova, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ukraine (about 25% of solid democrats). This great variance indicates also a great variance in the effectiveness of democracy among transforming countries. Very generally speaking: where the impact of the transformation process was not so harmful there people trust democracy more.

Competitive elections became standard in Eastern Europe. Using mostly the proportional representation, the outcomes have shown that many parties can gain parliamentary representation. For this reason, the turbulence within the political spectrum became reality for a few years, in some countries this process still continues.
This change, when the parliament suddenly does what it is supposed to – i.e. it quarrels about politics – brought much distrust in it. However, we may see a certain amount of distrust as healthy, securing the constructive critical attitude of the competent polity.
Political trust can be measured as the support for certain political institutions, such as government or parliament. As Mishler and Rose (1994) illuminate, the regime support and the support for legislature in Eastern Europe is widespread, although it still doesn’t reach the support in Western European countries. Most citizens support their legislature in the sense that they would oppose attempts to abolish it. According to their research, support for legislature tends to be higher among attentive publics and those most satisfied with the performance of the economy.