Macroeconomic performance, political trust and the Great Recession: A multilevel analysis of the effects of within‐country fluctuations in macroeconomic performance on political trust in 15 EU countries, 1999–2011

Abstract

Recent cross‐national comparative studies have found no effect of countries’ macroeconomic performances on trust in national political institutions, once political explanations (most notably corruption) are taken into account. Although political trust is not determined by the comparison of national economic performance to other countries, it is argued in this article that it is affected by comparisons to their own past performance. In a multilevel, fixed effects analysis of Eurobarometer data (21 waves in 15 European Union Member States between 1999 and 2011) the extent to which within‐country variations in economic performance affect political trust longitudinally is tested. Three major conclusions are reached. First, within‐country, longitudinal changes in performance (growth, deficits, unemployment and inflation) affect political trust. Second, the impact of macroeconomic performance is stronger among the lower educated. Third, even in times of economic duress, budgetary deficits tend to undermine political trust.

Corruption and Trust in the European Union and National Institutions: Changes over the Great Recession across European States

“…Interestingly, Panel (b) of Figure points to the fact that, by adjusting for GDP growth and unemployment rate (which substantially worsened in some countries after the start of the Great Recession), the trend in trust becomes much more flat and differences between average trust levels before and after the Crisis are no longer statistically significant. This indicates, as found by Van Erkel and Van Der Meer (), that the negative economic consequences of the economic recession largely explain the drop in trust in institutions observed during the same period. In the following, we will test whether the effect of Corruption on trust changed after the start of the Crisis, even controlling for the economic consequences of the Great Recession.…”

“…Finally, following Van Erkel and Van Der Meer (), in a second step of our multivariate analyses we included GDP growth and unemployment rates as independent variables to test whether the effect of the crisis can be completely explained by economic factors.…”

Political support among winners and losers: Within‐ and between‐country effects of structure, process and performance in Europe

“…Recently, in Europe, attention to this link has increased because of the financial crisis, with negative implications for the relationship between citizens and state institutions. Research shows that overall levels of democratic satisfaction and political trust run parallel to macroeconomic indicators (Dotti Sani & Magistro ; Quaranta & Martini ; Van Erkel & Van der Meer ).…”

“…; Dahlberg & Holmberg ; Donovan & Karp ; Van der Meer & Hakhverdian ). Similarly, recent contributions point to a direct effect of macroeconomic conditions on support (Dotti Sani & Magistro ; Quaranta & Martini ; Van Erkel & Van der Meer ). Some studies argue that the quality of the institutional process might reduce the winner‐loser gap (Dahlberg & Linde ), but none consider the effect of economic performance.…”

Does EU regional policy increase parties’ support for European integration?

“…Finally, we take potential effects of the sovereign debt and economic crisis in Europe into account since the Euro crisis has provoked political reactions by EU citizens resulting in a stark decline in political trust and democracy (see e.g. van Erkel and van der Meer 2016). We created a dummy variable indicating if a regional election has taken place before (0) or after (1) the outbreak of the Euro crisis in October 2009 (Featherstone 2011).…”