Data for <b>Trust and Obstacles in Cross-Border Cooperation: What European Experience Tells Us?</b>

Yet, little is known about how the obstacles that citizens perceive in cooperation with their neighbors shape trust, and whether everyday cross-border mobility can soften these effects. Drawing on proximity, social capital, rational choice, and intergroup contact theories, this article examines how five perceived CBC obstacles (accessibility, legal and administrative, socioeconomic, cultural, and language differences) are associated with trust, and whether the intensity of cross-border flows positively moderates, that is, buffers, these associations.

Using the EU Cross-Border Cooperation Survey 2020 covering 54 <i>INTERREG A</i> Programs, we estimate ordered logit models of generalized trust and OLS models of comfort-based trust toward cross-border neighbors with both country and program fixed effects. Perceived legal, socioeconomic, cultural, and language differences are consistently and negatively associated with generalized trust, whereas accessibility obstacles reduce comfort-based trust toward neighbors but not generalized trust.