A central tenet of the New Economic Sociology is that trust is a central factor in the sound functioning of markets. Previous research has mainly used a national-scale network approach to argue that personal relations generate trust in market relations. In contrast, this article shows, from a comparative perspective, how political structures influence consumer trust. First, using aggregate data, it shows how consumer trust in markets varies across the 28 European Union (EU) member states. Second, it uses regression models to examine the effects of varying levels of political embeddedness on consumer trust, taking consumer policy as a proxy. The results support the view that it is not only personal relations that generate trust in market relations but also political structures. This argument echoes institutional economic sociological approaches, and it adds to them a trust dimension. It furthermore encourages a more finely grained comparative analysis to better account for the effects of social macrostructures on trust.

新经济社会学的中心原则是，信任是市场稳健运行的核心因素。先前的研究主要使用全国规模的网络方法来论证，个人关系对市场关系产生信任。相反，本文从比较的角度显示了政治结构如何影响消费者的信任。首先，它使用汇总数据显示了欧盟28个成员国中消费者对市场的信任度如何变化。其次，它以消费者政策为代表，使用回归模型来检验不同程度的政治嵌入对消费者信任的影响。结果支持这样一种观点，即对市场关系产生信任的不仅是个人关系，还包括政治结构。这一论点呼应了制度经济学的社会学方法，并且给他们增加了信任感。它还鼓励进行更细粒度的比较分析，以更好地说明社会宏观结构对信任的影响。