Left behind in a public services wasteland? On the accessibility of public services and political trust

Abstract

Public discourse and scholars alike argue that the spatial divide in voting behavior and attitudes is rooted in geographic inequalities that serve as breeding grounds for political discontent. In previous studies, scholars have mainly focused on the economic conditions to analyze how place-based context influences the voting behavior of citizens. However, this focus on voting behavior and a small set of contextual variables do not allow us to draw direct conclusions as to how, and which, place-based factors relate to discontent on the attitudinal level.I argue that the accessibility of public service infrastructure specifically serves as a low-intensity information cue for citizens to evaluate the political performance of modern welfare states. These evaluations complement objective economic perceptions and are part of the performance-trust link. Hence, citizens should trust the government less if public services are not provided or only hard to access.I test this relationship for the German case by spatially linking the addresses of survey respondents with the location of public service facilities and collective municipallevel data. The resulting unique data set allows to explore the relationship between the accessibility of public service facilities and political trust as well as their temporal development. Results of multilevel analyses indicate that shorter distances to train stations are associated with increased trust in the government, but all other results, such as the change in service provision, remain inconclusive. The findings implicate that a long-term lack of public services contributes to geographically polarized discontent in Germany.