Trust across political conflicts: Evidence from a survey experiment in divided societies

Abstract

The implications of intergroup political conflicts for social cooperation are still an understudied topic. We report on two online survey experiments in which we implement multiple trust games to assess the impact of different political conflicts on trust behaviour in two national samples in Spain and Portugal. The results suggest that citizens’ social trust is heavily affected by partisanship, favouring in-group party members over out-group party identifiers. This finding is robust in both countries, although the partisanship overall effect seems to be stronger in Spain, which has a more polarized party system. Moreover, the effect involves all parties despite their size and ideology. However, trust among different partisans mirrors interparty positioning. A second study for the Spanish case shows that the partisanship treatment is the one affecting trust the most, followed by the ideological and regional conflicts, which are usually considered long-standing divides with a greater impact in European democracies.