Contextual Theories of Political Support

Martini, Sergio; Quaranta, Mario

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-21633-7_3

“…In political science, the currently most influential perspective is the ‘trust‐as‐evaluation’ approach (see van der Meer, 2018, for a review) that regards citizens’ trust in democratic institutions as the outcome of a substantive evaluation of democratic performance. Citizens extend trust if they perceive political outcomes and processes to meet their expectations, and inequality is regularly seen as one relevant dimension of macroeconomic performance that citizens consider in their evaluation (e.g., Martini & Quaranta, 2020). The study by Anderson and Singer (2008) provides support for this view, as it has shown that inequality depresses trust and satisfaction with democracy primarily among left‐wing respondents.…”

Section: Theory and Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, research on inequality's effects on attitudes towards democracy remains inconclusive. Some scholars either see no overall decrease in trust (or closely related concepts like satisfaction with democracy) or find no clear relation with inequality (Kim et al, 2022; Magalhães, 2014; Martini & Quaranta, 2020; Norris, 1999; van Beek et al., 2019). To help advance the literature and possibly reconcile these contradictory findings, this article provides further empirical evidence and investigates the mechanisms underlying a potential relationship between inequality and citizens’ democratic orientations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining the ‘democratic malaise’ in unequal societies: Inequality, external efficacy and political trust

Bienstman

¹

,

Hense

²

,

Gangl

³

2023

European J Political Res

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Previous scholarship suggests that rising inequality in democracies suppresses trust in institutions. However, the mechanism behind this has not clearly been identified. This paper investigates the proposition that income inequality leads to increased democratic distrust by depressing perceptions of external efficacy. Based on time‐series cross‐sectional survey data from the European Social Survey, we find that changes in income inequality have a negative effect on changes in political trust and external efficacy. Causal mediation analysis confirms that inequality affects trust through lower efficacy. Further analyses show that this efficacy‐based mechanism does not depend on political orientation. As a direct effect remains among left‐wing respondents, our empirical results indicate that inequality affects trust via both a mechanism of substantive output evaluation and a process‐based evaluation that measures of external efficacy can capture. These findings highlight the empirical and theoretical relevance of this so far neglected mechanism and provide a potential solution for the puzzle that inequality depresses trust also among those for whom inequality is not politically salient.

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“…Only few studies so far apply a longitudinal design and investigate the effect of changes in inequality on changes in political support. While those generally find more consistent negative effects on political trust (Goubin and Hooghe, 2020) and the related concept of satisfaction with democracy (Christmann, 2018), others find no or inconsistent effects (Sirinić and Bosancianu, 2017;Martini and Quaranta, 2020). The commonality of the longitudinal approach notwithstanding, these differences may once again lie in the difference in study design and consequently, in the type of question these studies can answer.…”

Section: Inequality and Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, the focus is on the relationship between trust and individual characteristics, but one expands by exploring whether that individual-level relationship differs between contexts. The argument would be that the relationship between individual characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status, political orientation, or electoral status) is stronger or weaker in more unequal contexts (for examples, see Anderson and Singer, 2008;Zmerli and Castillo, 2015;Goubin, 2020;Goubin and Hooghe, 2020;Martini and Quaranta, 2020).…”

Section: Inequality and Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does inequality erode political trust?

Bienstman

¹

2023

Front. Polit. Sci.

2

0

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A long-standing argument in the political sciences holds that high levels of inequality are incompatible with democracy. Although a number of studies have by now investigated whether income inequality endangers democratic consolidation and stability through corroding popular support, the findings remain inconclusive. This study provides new evidence for a sociotropic effect of macroeconomic income inequality on trust in the institutions of representative democracy by making use of the random effects within between specification in multilevel models for data from 28 European democracies over a period of 16 years. The findings show that both long-standing differences in income inequality between countries and changes in inequality within countries over time are negatively related to trust in institutions. While the spirit-level thesis states that this effect should be more pronounced among rich democracies, the findings show that the effect of inequality is stronger in countries that are less affluent. Further analyses on whether the social-psychological mechanism proposed by the spirit-level thesis mediates the effect of inequality on trust document a partial transmission via status concerns and social trust. However, the study suggests that income inequality primarily influences trust in institutions through evaluation-based processes as captured by economic evaluations.

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Does inequality erode political trust?

Bienstman¹

2023

Preprint

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A long-standing argument in the political sciences holds that high levels of inequality are incompatible with democracy. Although a number of studies have by now investigated whether income inequality endangers democratic consolidation and stability through corroding popular support, the findings remain inconclusive. This study provides new evidence for a sociotropic effect of macroeconomic income inequality on trust in the institutions of representative democracy by making use of the random effects within between specification in multilevel models for data from 28 European democracies over a period of 16 years. The findings show that both long-standing differences in income inequality between countries and changes in inequality within countries over time are negatively related to trust in institutions. While the spirit-level thesis states that this effect should be more pronounced among rich democracies, the findings show that the effect of inequality is stronger in countries that are less affluent. Further analyses on whether the social-psychological mechanism proposed by the spirit-level thesis mediates the effect of inequality on trust document a partial transmission via status concerns and social trust. However, the study suggests that income inequality primarily influences trust in institutions through evaluation-based processes as captured by economic evaluations.

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Contextual Theories of Political Support

Cited by 3 publications

References 74 publications

Explaining the ‘democratic malaise’ in unequal societies: Inequality, external efficacy and political trust

Explaining the ‘democratic malaise’ in unequal societies: Inequality, external efficacy and political trust

Does inequality erode political trust?

Does inequality erode political trust?

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