Downbound Spiral? Economic Grievances, Perceived Social Protection, and Political Distrust

Atle Haugsgjerd,Staffan Kumlin

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3054403

Abstract

Momentous events in Western democracies have brought renewed attention to how various aspects of government-controlled policy outputs and outcomes affect citizens politically. Unlike most previous research this study uses individual-level panel data to test the link between government performance and political trust. Moreover, we gauge performance in more policy domains than previous research including key aspects of government-controlled social services as well as a wide range of economic risks. We find that evaluations of government performance do have implications for trust in institutions of representative democracy. The evidence, however, is stronger for evaluations of social protection than for economic risks. Crucially, our analysis suggests that the relationship between performance evaluations and distrust is not unidirectional, but reciprocal. The relationship may thus be described as a “downbound spiral” where dissatisfied and vulnerable groups develop distrust, which in turn makes for a more pessimistic interpretation of the political world.

Highlights

Distrust in political elites and institutions has been researched for some five decades, the phenomenon has recently received unparalleled attention
Moving on to economic grievances, we find, as expected, that income is positively related to political trust
As discussed in the method section, this may be partly due to few respondents being unemployed in the sample. These findings may suggest that economic risks originating outside the labour market are important as job-related worries for political trust

Summary

Introduction

Distrust in political elites and institutions has been researched for some five decades, the phenomenon has recently received unparalleled attention. By contrast, collected Norwegian primary individual-level panel data in 2014-15, as the country suddenly experienced a structural economic shift due to falling oil prices These developments received major media and political attention and made issues related to economic risks and welfare state policies highly salient. We construct an index of a battery of questions measuring subjective performance satisfaction with 13 different public services spanning over a wide range of policy areas that all contribute to the traditional goals of welfare states, i.e. social security and equality. The political trust index is regressed on three groups of independent variables capturing economic grievances, welfare state evaluations and standard sociodemographic and political controls. This suggests political trust can serve as a heuristic affecting how people judge the functioning of the welfare state, and their own personal economic situation

Conclusions

Question wording and variable coding

Fixed effects models of political trust with alternative dependent variable