Political Trust as the Evaluation of Process and Performance: A Cross-National Study of 42 European Countries
| Author | Armen Hakhverdian,Tom van der Meer |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321715607514 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
607514PSX0010.1177/0032321715607514Political Studiesvan der Meer and Hakhverdian
research-article2016
Article
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(1) 81 –102
Political Trust as the
© The Author(s) 2016
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Evaluation of Process
DOI: 10.1177/0032321715607514
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and Performance:
A Cross-National Study of
42 European Countries
Tom van der Meer and Armen Hakhverdian
Abstract
This article extends and tests the trust-as-evaluation approach that is dominant in political science.
Citizens supposedly grant and withhold trust in politics based on an assessment of its merits. We
argue that the relevance of performances and processes should be conditional on the values that
citizens hold dear and the accuracy with which they perceive them. Through multilevel analyses
of the European Value Survey 2008, we model the (conditional) effects of a wide range of macro-
economic outcomes and procedural characteristics on two aspects of political trust: satisfaction
with democracy and confidence in political institutions. We find that macro-economic outcomes
do not relate to political trust once we control for corruption. The effects of corruption and
macro-economic outcomes are indeed stronger among the higher educated. However, the effect
of macro-economic outcomes is not conditional on citizens’ values. We discuss the theoretical
implications of these findings for the use of the trust-as-evaluation approach.
Keywords
political trust, evaluation, economic performance, corruption, left–right
Accepted: 30 July 2015
Introduction
Trust of citizens in their national political institutions is an important facet of the legiti-
macy of representative democracy (Berelson, 1952). However, the functioning of democ-
racy also benefits from a degree of healthy scepticism on the side of its citizens: an upheld
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Tom van der Meer, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Postbus 15578,
1001 NB Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: t.w.g.vandermeer@uva.nl
82
Political Studies 65 (1)
judgement in seeking evidence to trust or distrust (Cook and Gronke, 2005). Scepticism
about specific politicians and disagreement with policies motivate people to engage in
politics (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002). Fundamental, diffuse support for the regime
(the democratic principles) therefore differs from the more cyclical, specific support for
the institutions and actors that function within that regime (Easton, 1975). A well-func-
tioning representative democracy requires trust in the regime, but scepticism in the insti-
tutions and actors that govern it from day to day.
At its core, trust represents an evaluation of a relationship between a subject (the one
who trusts) and an object (the one who is trusted) (Hardin, 2000). Low levels of trust
would indicate a deteriorating relationship between citizens and their states. But if the
nature of trust is fundamentally evaluative, then this begs the question to what extent citi-
zens actually evaluate the economic or procedural performance of their country (e.g.
Norris, 2011). In other words, do citizens retroactively judge the quality of the macro-
economic outcomes or democratic procedures? And if so, do citizens decide to grant or
withhold trust based on cross-sectional evidence on how well one’s own country is per-
forming compared to other countries?
Political trust is known to be strongly related to perceptions of performance, account-
ability, impartiality, corruption, and so on (e.g. Van der Meer and Dekker, 2011). However,
the extent to which political trust is based on actual policy performance and actual pro-
cedures remains hotly debated. Consider macro-economic outcomes. A large scholarly
effort has been directed at assessing the relationship between macro-economic outcomes
on indicators of political trust. Some conclude that economic success correlates with
political trust (e.g. Anderson, 2009; Clarke et al., 1993; Cusack, 1999; Miller and
Listhaug, 1999; Taylor, 2000), but many others that it does not (e.g. Dalton, 2004;
Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012; McAllister, 1999; Oskarsson, 2010; Rahn and Rudolph,
2005; Van der Meer, 2010). Corruption, on the other hand, is consistently found to have a
strong, negative impact on political trust (Anderson and Tverdova, 2003; Della Porta,
2000; Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012; Oskarsson, 2010; Van der Meer, 2010).
Yet although the cross-national literature on political trust generally suggests that citi-
zens’ political trust reflects their country’s economic or procedural performance, the eval-
uative nature of political trust has remained surprisingly understudied. The contextual
effects found in earlier studies are necessary but not sufficient evidence for the evaluative
nature of political trust. Trust-as-evaluation also implies that the strength of these effects
depends on the criteria that citizens find relevant.
The primary aim of this article is to push forward and test the evaluative character of
political trust. We do so in two ways. First, we test to what extent the two main cross-
sectional explanations in the scholarly literature – performance and process (Norris,
2011) – feature in citizens’ trust-calculus. In line with the broader literature, we focus on
economic factors to capture policy performance and public sector corruption as the main
procedural characteristics. We examine the correlates of political trust using a wider range
of economic and non-economic indicators in a larger and more diverse sample of coun-
tries than has hitherto been done.
Second, we take the heterogeneity of the population into account. Trust-as-evaluation
implies that trust is evaluated against some ideal or benchmark. These ideals differ
between citizens as they are likely to have different criteria in mind when evaluating
process or performance. Anderson and Singer (2008) introduce an important argument on
the conditional nature of contextual determinants of political trust. They show that income
inequality should induce distrust and dissatisfaction among those who care most about
van der Meer and Hakhverdian
83
issues of redistribution. We present a more comprehensive test of their general argument
by analysing whether citizens grant or withhold trust especially when that particular eco-
nomic outcome features in their personal policy concerns. Similarly, although all citizens
are likely to be repelled by corruption in most democracies, dysfunctional institutions are
unlikely to affect all citizens equally if only due to heterogeneity in terms of cognitive and
moral functions (Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012).
We make use of the European Values Survey 2008 to test simultaneously a range of
hypotheses on policy performance and political trust on a wide and diverse set of 42
countries. By employing multilevel models we are able to assess individual and contex-
tual effects simultaneously and assess to what extent the supposed contextual effects of
political performance and political procedures vary alongside citizen characteristics.
Theory
The Nature of Trust
At its core, trust constitutes a subjective evaluation of a relationship between a subject
(the one who trusts) and an object (the one who is trusted): ‘A trusts B to do x’ (Hardin,
2000: 9). Given this relational nature of the concept, we should look for explanations of
trust in characteristics of the subject (in this case, the citizens who trust or distrust), the
object (the institution that is or is not trusted), and especially their interaction.
Which circumstances, then, enable citizens to trust national politics, that is, the regime
and its institutions? Political trust may be considered rational to the extent that the object
is evaluated by its own merits (Harteveld et al., 2013): trust as a rational attitude implies
that the object of trust meets the requirements of being competent (able to perform accord-
ing to expectations), caring (intrinsically committed), accountable (extrinsically commit-
ted due to encapsulated interest), and predictable (consistent) (Kasperson et al., 1992;
Van der Meer, 2010). A less stringent approach, though, would be to focus not on rational-
ity but on the cognitive basis of political trust: trust as an evaluation of politics against –
conceptually idiosyncratic – ideals or benchmarks.
Economic Performance
Trust as an evaluative orientation implies that good performance in terms of substantive
policy outcomes ought to induce high levels of political trust. Effectively, most political
trust research has been restricted to one specific policy area: macro-economic perfor-
mance. Miller and Listhaug (1999) claim that ‘economic performance is critical to overall
public support of government’ (p. 216). In this view, both longitudinal and cross-national
variance in political trust should be accounted for by economic successes and failures.
What constitutes a success and what constitutes a failure is of obvious importance, but a
matter that shall be addressed below when discussing the heterogeneity in citizens’
evaluations.
At first sight, evidence seems to lend credence to the economic claim. Longitudinally,
fluctuations in political trust run parallel to fluctuations in consumer confidence
(Bovens and Wille, 2008; Dalton, 2004; Keele, 2007; Van de Walle et al., 2008), while
citizens’ trust in...
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