Abstract

This article investigates the effects of social trust, both direct and mediated – via internal and external efficacy – on different forms of political participation in post-communist Lithuania. The relationship between social trust and participation features prominently in the social capital and civic culture literature, but little empirical evidence exists that supports it, especially in post-communist democracies. We use the Lithuanian National Elections Study 2012 to test our hypotheses and replicate our analysis with the European Social Survey waves of 2014 and 2016. Our results show that social trust increases turnout, because it is related to a sense of external efficacy, which in turn enhances the likelihood that people vote. There is, however, no association between social trust and being involved in other institutionalised politics, namely, working for a political party. Interestingly, we find a positive indirect effect for non-institutionalised political participation: social trust increases external efficacy, which in turn enhances protest behaviour. Overall, however, social trust does not lead to more protesting, because the former is at the same time positively related to political trust, which seems to decrease, rather than increase non-institutionalised participation. In sum, our findings demonstrate that explanations for political participation based on the core element of social capital – social trust – work out differently for different forms of political participation.

Highlights

  • Almost two decades ago, the ground-breaking study of Howard (2003) underlined the conventional wisdom that citizens in Central and Eastern European democracies are less likely to engage in civil society practices than people from other post-authoritarian countries, and especially, mature Western democracies

  • Do social trusters in Lithuania participate in politics more actively than others? If so, why do they do so? And those who trust people less, do they participate less and why so? Put differently, what is the underlying causal chain between social trust and political participation? We focus on the mediating effects between social trust and political participation, namely, via internal and external efficacy, as they are arguably the most important motivators to participate in politics (Verba et al, 1995)

  • If we could raise the average level of social trust in the Lithuanian electorate by just one unit, we predict that the turnout, which is currently 65.0 per cent, would increase to 67.3 per cent

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Summary

Introduction

The ground-breaking study of Howard (2003) underlined the conventional wisdom that citizens in Central and Eastern European (hereafter – CEE) democracies are less likely to engage in civil society practices than people from other post-authoritarian countries, and especially, mature Western democracies. We formulate the following hypotheses: H 4-6: External and internal political efficacy play a mediating role between social trust and participation in voting (H4A-B), other institutionalised (H5A-B) and non-institutionalised (H6A-B) forms of politics. Using the ESS data, a positive effect of social trust on protesting and other non-institutionalised forms of participation is found in the analyses of Hooghe and Marien (2013) and Bäck and Christensen (2016).

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