Political trust as a cause and consequence of democracy: Longitudinal analysis of European data

Abstract

The causal link between political trust and democratic performance has been assumed rather than established. Building on research on political trust as related to regime legitimacy and on the evaluative nature of political trust, we formulate hypotheses about the effect of political trust on democracy and of democracy on political trust, both with regard to overall levels of trust in societies, as well as trust by education and age groups. We test these hypotheses with cross-lagged models applied to country time series of political trust from 26 European countries between 1991 and 2019, and with two democracy indicators, from the Varieties of Democracy and the Democracy Barometer projects. We find evidence of effects of democracy on trust and vice versa, as well as of differences in the effects of democracy on political trust among different education and age groups. The results are sensitive to the choice of the democracy indicator as well as the lag length, which points to the need of examining different reasonable combinations of indicators and nags in this kind of analysis.

‘Think Like Me, and I Will Trust You’

“…Furthermore, we expect the relationship between policy opinion congruence and political trust to be contingent upon some characteristics that are specific to the individuals. Previous research has emphasised the impact of education levels in moderating the effect of the quality of democracy on political trust (Kolczynska & Bürkner, 2021) or satisfaction with democracy (Mayne & Hakhverdian, 2017). For instance, Mayne and Hakhverdian (2017) found that the effect of congruence on democratic satisfaction is larger for citizens with higher levels of education.…”