Institutional trust, political participation, and corruption: A European comparative perspective

Abstract

Despite the theoretical and political importance of the relationship between institutional trust and different forms of political participation in Europe, theoretical and empirical focus on post-industrial economies leave the literature wanting of explanations of cross-national variation in political participation. In this article, we test whether levels of corruption influence the relationship between institutional trust and participation. We rely on the 9th wave of the European Social Survey results for an in-depth analysis of the relationship between institutional trust, political participation, and perceived corruption in 27 countries. The multilevel regression analysis results show that the effect of institutional trust on institutionalised political participation (including voting) is moderated by corruption. However, corruption does not moderate the relationship between institutional trust and non-institutionalised forms of participation.

Does Discrimination in Childhood Reduce Trust and Participation Among Adult Immigrants?

“…However, the empirical evidence of a relationship between social trust and political participation is not particularly strong. 1 The relationship between institutional trust and political participation seems to have a stronger empirical support (Grönlund & Setälä 2007;Harris 2014;Zafirović, Matijević & Filipović 2021), in line with the hypothesis that institutional trust is more context-dependent than social trust.…”

Co-partisanship with mayors, institutional performance, and citizen trust in local governance institutions: Evidence from Tunisia

“…However, the extant literature, which primarily focuses on national level politics (Cho and Bratton, 2006; Jacob and Schenke, 2020; Stoyan et al, 2016), particularly within developed countries (Bianco, 1994; Lambert et al, 1986; Kornberg and Clarke, 1994; Teehankee, 2012; Zafirovi et al, 2021), neglects the importance of trust in local institutions, and the ramifications of clientele networks for trust in institutions. This also limits the scholarly understanding of why some transitional democracies are more successful at gaining the trust of their citizens in institutions while others fail.…”