Low political trust disengages citizens from mainstream politics, stimulating anti-establishment voting and even electoral abstention. However, existing scholarship has largely overlooked the temporal dynamics of political trust. Next to high versus low trust, our study identifies two additional components of political trust: its long-term variability and its short-term variation. We employ fifteen waves of the Dutch LISS panel (2008–2023) to systematically test the impact of these three components of political trust on electoral behavior. We find that there are systematic and meaningful differences between stable and variable (dis)trusters. While trust levels are the strongest predictor of both support for anti-establishment and abstention, trust variability has an additional effect on electoral behavior. Short-term declines in political trust increase the chances of anti-establishment voting and abstention, independent of individuals’ overall trust levels and variability. These findings have important implications for our understanding of democratic alienation and critical citizenship.

What are the effects of campaigns of coercive social mobilization on political attitudes? We show that such policies can strengthen authoritarian regimes by altering citizens’ patterns of trust. From 1968 to 1978, 16–17 million Chinese teenagers were “sent-down” to labor in rural areas, where they lived without their families under difficult conditions. Using a regression discontinuity design to account for selection into being sent-down, we show that former sent-down students are more critical of local government performance compared to their counterparts, yet they are less critical of the national government and generally more supportive of the regime. We see no significant differences in political participation, though there is some suggestive evidence that the sent-down students are more likely to favor officially sanctioned political activities. These results appear to stem from the close social control and isolation from family associated with the sent-down experience.

This study explores whether ideological polarization increases political engagement and trust, both of which are central elements of civic culture. Polarization can clarify political positions and thereby simplify the formation of opinions, increase the stakes of elections, and offer more options to citizens. To estimate the impact of polarization from a causal perspective, we exploit variation within individuals over time using individual-level data from the Swiss Household Panel spanning from 1999 – 2023, amounting to 178,251 observations from 28,187 persons. Ideological polarization at the individual level is measured by a process of increasing extremity of the self-position on the left-right scale. In addition, we test how polarization of cohabiting household members has spillover effects on political engagement and trust. For political engagement, we adopt a comprehensive approach, focusing on interest in politics, participation in popular votes, party identification, and frequency of political discussions as dependent variables. Political trust is measured as confidence in the federal council. To analyze the data, we primarily use fixed effects models, complemented by a pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model, and cross-lagged models to address reverse causality. Results show that ideological polarization does promote engagement but has a weak negative impact on political trust. This effect remains significant when controlling for affective polarization. Additionally, there is an overall increase in political engagement and a decrease in political trust if partners living in the same household become more extreme in their ideological preferences.

This article presents an integrative literature review that explores citizens’ trust in the welfare state, distinguishing this sub-field from broader research on political trust. The review aims to systematise the factors that shape the experiences of vulnerable welfare users with social policy and so contribute to their (dis)trust in welfare. The first part of the article compares various meanings of trust at different levels of welfare state organisation, from user trust in frontline services to trust in the welfare state as a whole. The ambiguities arising from different operationalisations of ‘trust in the welfare state’ are shown. The second part presents key factors that influence such trust, including prevailing redistributive principles, managerial pressures, institutions’ perceived performance, distributive and procedural justice, and characteristics of frontline workers. The article concludes by linking these factors into causal mechanisms that reveal the tensions users face between bureaucratic procedures and personal interactions with frontline workers.

Most people are concerned about climate change and want policymakers to address it. But how? To investigate which policy options are more versus less popular, with whom, and why, we collected data in four European countries on attitudes toward 16 policies: taxes, bans, regulations, and subsidies/spending. We argue that support for different policies should reflect perceptions of policies’ net costs, and that such perceptions are likely influenced by people’s political trust. We tested this expectation by randomly assigning survey respondents to read different versions of given policies and confirmed that individuals with low political trust, who are less supportive overall of most policies, are most sensitive to variation in implied costs. We argue this interaction effect is a previously untested implication of the influential theory that political trust operates as a heuristic, and it helps explain policies’ varying popularity, including the puzzle of why carbon taxes are highly unpopular.

This themed section aims to contribute to our understanding of how users’ and citizens’ political (dis)trust comes about in the institutional context of social assistance. The section is focused on how welfare users experience various features of institutions when applying for and receiving social benefits and services, and how such features become relevant in building political (dis)trust. They include institutional fragmentation, users’ notions of distributive justice, the organisation of contact with caseworkers, and national legacies of informal practices in welfare services. All empirical articles are based on individual in-depth interviews with welfare users reflecting on their policy experience and institutional and political trust. The cases under comparison include five European countries – Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Serbia. The volume’s contribution points to research avenues for examining how welfare users’ experiences matter in shaping their welfare and political attitudes.

How can local governments in developing countries, constrained by limited resources, identify and respond to the most pressing public demands? This paper posits that public deliberative platforms, even those with controlled agendas, can be instrumental in this regard by facilitating communication between local elites and ordinary citizens, thereby leading to an observable uptick in political trust over time. Public deliberation serves two functions: firstly, it highlights shifting societal issues, incentivizing bureaucrats to respond more promptly; and secondly, it generates narratives that temporarily improve the public perception of local governments, even among individuals not directly benefiting from government actions. This study provides evidence consistent with these theoretical implications by examining Chinese topical debate programs, during which local officials engage with citizens and respond to their concerns. Empirical results based on a staggered difference-in-differences design suggest that broadcasting such programs in China produces a prompt increase in citizens’ trust in local officials. Our results demonstrate that public deliberation can yield noticeable outcomes in developing countries, even with controlled agendas and constrained resources.

This study explores the link between receiving basic income support (BIS) and political alienation in Germany, with a focus on political trust and satisfaction with democracy. We argue that receiving BIS is associated with experiences of material and social exclusion and impairs subjective social integration. Against the background of major structural welfare reforms in recent decades, we assume that BIS recipients are likely to attribute responsibility for their socio-economic disadvantages to the wider political system. We use data from the Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) for the years 2019–2021 and employ multivariate regression analysis. We find that political alienation is more likely to occur among recipients of BIS, especially long-term recipients, than among non-recipients. Social exclusion is an important mechanism: With a higher risk of material deprivation and fewer opportunities for social participation and civic engagement than non-recipients, BIS recipients are more likely to experience subjective social exclusion, which, in turn, contributes to their political alienation. Moreover, our study offers indications that trustful and supportive interactions with welfare authorities can mitigate tendencies of political alienation among BIS recipients.

The article examines the relationship between perceived distributive justice and trust in the welfare system within complex and self-contradictory policy setting. Based on thirty-three in-depth interviews with social assistance users in Poland and Czechia, we find that policy assemblages in those countries are experienced as confusing ‘institutional enigmas’. We identify four patterns linking perceptions of welfare system’s distributive justice and trust in this context: perceived rationality of the system combined with trust; perceived lack of system’s empathy combined with distrust; concerns about ‘undeserving claimants’ overusing the system linked to distrust in welfare system; and unexpected (non)receiving of benefits causing surprise and shaping (dis)trust. We argue that in contradictory institutional embedding, achieving users’ trust is challenging due to complex distributive justice principles they adhere to and numerous instances of those principles being violated. Trust can still be fostered when users are well informed or experience receiving meaningful support.

Do conflicts abroad affect trust at home? While we know that conflicts impact trust in warring countries, we lack evidence on whether people in neighbouring, but non-involved, countries are also affected. We address this question in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which represented a large shock to the security and economy of European countries. Our identification strategy uses the overlap between the timing of the Russian invasion and the European Social Survey fieldwork in eleven European countries. We find that the invasion increased respondents’ trust in their country’s politicians, political parties, and national parliament, as well as satisfaction with the government. Further analyses using other surveys and previous conflicts suggest this effect depends on proximity to the conflict and the political regimes of the attacked country. These findings contribute to our understanding of the complex and indirect effects of conflicts on domestic political trust.

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.

One reason given for declining levels of trust in politicians and institutions is the incidence of scandals involving voters' representatives. Politicians implicated in scandals, especially financial scandals, typically see their constituents' support for them decrease. It has been suggested that these specific negative judgements about a representative's misconduct spill over onto diffuse political trust in the system as a whole. We argue that the 2009 Parliamentary expenses scandal in the United Kingdom is a strong test of these scandal spillover effects in a non-experimental context. Yet, using a multilevel analysis of survey and representative implication data, we find no evidence for these effects. This is despite voters being aware of their MP's scandal implication, and this awareness affecting voters' support for their own MP. We conclude that voters' judgements about their constituency representatives are unlikely to affect their diffuse political trust.

Political trust, which signifies the belief in the responsible exercise of power by political institutions, is a fundamental prerequisite for democratic legitimacy. However, even amidst a democratic deficit, the public's trust in the military can remain firm. This study aims to illuminate the prevailing trend and potential factors influencing public trust in the military in Taiwan from 2001 to 2022. The trajectory of trust in Taiwan's military implies fluctuating trust levels in response to the varying intensity of external threats. However, in general, confidence in the armed forces remains higher than that in other political institutions, a trend that is also observed in other nations. The statistical evidence demonstrates substantial support for both cultural and institutional explanations of political trust in the military in Taiwan throughout the initial two decades of the twenty-first century. However, the institutional explanation appears to be more robust than the cultural explanation. Notably, statistical results on trust in the government are consistent across all six survey rounds, with institutional factors showing higher overall significance in the pooled dataset compared to cultural factors, thereby emphasizing the institutional perspective.