Political trust in a multilevel polity: patterns of differentiation among more and less politically sophisticated citizens
| Author | Dominika Proszowska,Giedo Jansen,Bas Denters |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211022826 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Political trust in a
multilevel polity:
patterns of
differentiation among
more and less politically
sophisticated citizens
Dominika Proszowska
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Giedo Jansen
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Bas Denters
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Abstract
Differentiation in political trust attitudes occurs when citizens distinguish between
different political institutions in terms of their trustworthiness. This article explores
patterns of citizens’ (non-)differentiation between the local, national and European
Union governance levels with regard to political trust. With unique Dutch data, we
find that trust evaluations of each pair of governments (local–national/national–
European Union/local–European Union) follows a distinct pattern. This suggests that
citizens: (1) form more than one political trust attitude; and (2) use different cognitive
mechanisms (like cognitive proximity and subjective rationality) to make sense of the
political complexities in multilevel governance systems. Although general patterns
found at the population level were largely reproduced at the subgroup level, that is,
low and high political sophistication groups produced similar patterns of (non-)differ-
entiation, highly politically sophisticated citizens tended to differentiate more – they are
more likely to evaluate each governance level ‘on its own merits’. Our results are
Corresponding author:
Dominika Proszowska, University of Twente, Kerkheuvel 3, 6336 AX Hulsberg, The Netherlands.
Email: d.k.proszowska@utwente.nl
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00208523211022826
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2023, Vol. 89(1) 165–185
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
especially relevant in an era of declining trust, where governments want to regain
citizens’ trust but are very much in the dark about which government level (if any) is
the main culprit.
Points for practitioners
Citizens, particularly those with higher political interest, more exposure to political
information and higher education, tend to differentiate in their trust orientations
towards different governments. This suggests that citizens, to some extent, judge dif-
ferent governments in the multilevel system ‘on their own merits’. Therefore, politi-
cians and public managers confronted with declining trust in their jurisdiction should
seriously consider whether such a negative trend might not reflect citizens’ dissatisfac-
tion with their governments’ lack of responsiveness to the specific demands of its
citizens.
Keywords
European Union politics, local politics, multilevel governance, national politics, political
confidence, political sophistication, political trust
Introduction
Differentiation in political attitudes occurs to the extent that citizens distinguish
between different attitudinal objects (e.g. executive governments across the multi-
level governance structure) in terms of their particular attributes (e.g. their trust-
worthiness). In contemporary multilevel systems, attitudinal differentiation is by
no means self-evident. Political decisions are the result of interactions in complex
networks of actors operating at different tiers of government (Bache and Flinders,
2004; Torfing and Sørensen, 2014; Zapata-Barrero et al., 2017). This makes dis-
tinguishing between different institutions and their role in joint decision-making a
challenging task. Studying differentiation in multilevel systems can tell us whether
and how citizens face this challenge and form political attitudes in complex polit-
ical environments.
Previous studies have suggested several cognitive mechanisms (or heuristics)
that citizens may use for this task, such as cognitive minimalism (Zaller, 1992),
institutional saliency (Anderson, 1998; Sanchez-Cuenca, 2000; Torcal and
Christmann, 2019), cognitive proximity (Dahl, 1994; Vetter, 2002) and subjective
rationality (Mishler and Rose, 2001; Mu~
noz, 2017; van der Meer, 2010). As we
explain later, some of these mechanisms postulate that citizens perceive institutions
as one monolithic political force, whereas others suggest that citizens (are able to)
distinguish between different political institutions.
This article studies attitude differentiation in relation to political trust. Political
trust is particularly relevant because it establishes and nurtures the connection
166 International Review of Administrative Sciences 89(1)
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