Abstract
In light of recent crises, not least the COVID-19 pandemic, citizen trust in the political system has been highlighted as one of the central features ensuring citizen compliance and the functioning of democracy. Given its many desirable consequences, one of the key questions is how to increase political trust among ordinary citizens. This paper investigates the role of democratic quality in determining citizens’ trust in the political system. While we know that citizens’ evaluations of democratic performance are a strong predictor of political trust, previous research has shown that trust is not always higher in political systems with higher democratic quality, indicating that democratic performance evaluations do not always correspond to actual democratic quality. Several moderating factors may account for this disconnect between democratic quality and citizens’ evaluations of democratic performance and, ultimately, political trust. For one, citizens may receive different information about the political system; second, they may process this information in different ways; and third, they may have different standards of what democratic quality ought to be. Using survey data from three rounds of the World Values Survey (2005–2020) and aggregate data on democratic quality and other macro determinants of political trust from the V-Dem project and World Development Indicators for 50 democracies around the world, this contribution empirically investigates the complex relationship between democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, and political trust in multi-level moderated mediation models. Its findings demonstrate that democratic quality affects political trust indirectly through citizens’ democratic performance evaluations and that this indirect effect is stronger for citizens with higher political interest, higher education, and especially those with more liberal conceptions of democracy.
Highlights
Ever since the seminal works of David Easton (1965, 1975), scholars have considered political trust as essential for the stability and for the smooth functioning of democracy (Hetherington, 1998; Dalton, 2004; Letki, 2006; Newton, 2009; Marien and Hooghe, 2011)
Instead, confirming hypothesis 1, macro-level democratic quality exerts a sizable indirect effect on political trust that is mediated through individual-level democratic performance evaluations (Model 3, Table 1)
In line with the theoretical argument, which expects the relationship between macro-level democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations to vary according to citizens’ information, cognitive processes, and standards, Models 4 to 6 estimate these cross-level interactions on the first part of the indirect effect, i.e. the link between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations
Summary
Ever since the seminal works of David Easton (1965, 1975), scholars have considered political trust as essential for the stability and for the smooth functioning of democracy (Hetherington, 1998; Dalton, 2004; Letki, 2006; Newton, 2009; Marien and Hooghe, 2011). If we assume that education increases the accuracy of citizens’ beliefs about their country’s democratic quality, we can expect education to have a moderating effect on the relationship between macro-level democratic quality and individual-level democratic performance evaluations as well as, by extension, political trust. We can expect democratic performance evaluations to reflect macro-level democratic quality more closely for citizens who hold procedural and liberal conceptions of democracy, and for the indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust to be larger for these citizens. To examine how macro-level democratic quality interacts with individual-level political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy in determining citizens’ democratic performance evaluations and political trust, I combine aggregate data from the Varieties-of-Democracy project (Coppedge et al, 2020) and World Development Indicators (World Bank, 2020) with survey data from the World Values Survey (Haerpfer et al, 2020). By combining multilevel mediation with cross-level interaction effects, these models allow us to test complex hypotheses about the origins of political trust and to study how democratic quality affects democratic performance evaluations and, eventually, political trust, differently among different people
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