Political Trust and Democracy: The Critical Citizens Thesis Re-Examined

Abstract

This paper empirically assesses competing perspectives of the relationship between democracy and political trust. We conduct multilevel analyses on a cross-national panel dataset of 82 countries for the period 1990-2020. The findings suggest that there is a strong, negative relationship between democracy and political trust that cannot easily be dismissed as an artifact of model misspecification or response bias. Moreover, we re-examine the critical citizens thesis by disaggregating political trust into trust in partisan and “non-partisan” institutions to test the claim that well-functioning democracies contain and channel distrust into the more partisan political institutions to keep distrust from generalizing to the entire political system. The results fail to find a statistically significant difference of the effect of democracy on trust between partisan and non-partisan institutions, suggesting that low political trust may be a stronger contributor to democratic decline than much of the literature suggests.

Keywords: Democracy; Political Trust; Cross-National; Quantitative Methods