Partisanship, Attitudes of Political Distrust and their Implications for Democracy

Political parties consistently receive the lowest trust scores among political institutions in western European democracies. If we consider political parties as indispensable pieces of democratic governance and believe elections to provide an opportunity for citizens to hold parties accountable, the continuous process of dealignment coupled with rising distrust of political parties are worrisome signs for our democracies. At the same time, the various socio-political changes in European democracies have also helped to create a more critical citizenry, with access to unprecedented amounts of information and multiple election platforms allowing for multiple party choices. This paper focuses on the relationship between the changing modes of citizens’ partisanship and their attitudes of political distrust. Studying data from the British Election Study (2010), as well as a series of new items capturing multidimensional institutional trust through an online survey in the UK, it finds that the possibility of identifying with more than one political party is associated with expressing higher specific and diffuse political trust and higher intentions of participating in an election. However, active distrust does direct some disaffected voters to abstention and others to vote for protest parties, which may be posing a threat to the accountability mechanism of elections. These findings suggest that a more critical citizen stance towards political parties is not an unwelcome development for democracy and that further research should focus on those attitudes of active distrust in order to better understand their implications on participation and vote choice that could undermine democratic processes.