One Effect Does Not Fit All? Welfare State Dissatisfaction and Political Distrust in Europe, 2008-2016

The Great Recession and the following sovereign debt crises have brought renewed attention to how Europeans evaluate the institutions and outcomes of their political systems. This paper studies how evaluations of the performance of welfare state policies and functions impact generalized confidence in democratic institutions, i.e. political trust. Theoretically, our undertaking is situated in recent research on political trust finding that government performance factors have become increasingly more important. Yet, the current literature has predominantly focused on economic performance. A particular suspicion raised in the literature, however, is that the combination of macroeconomic downturn and feared or realized underperformance of social protection is a key driver of political distrust in European welfare states. Therefore, we focus on the following research question: Have negative effects of welfare performance dissatisfaction on political distrust become stronger between 2008 and 2016? And if so, are changes more pronounced for countries and/or individuals more strongly exposed to the economic shocks and austerity policies? We build on and extend these recent findings in three ways: first, we assume that major events affecting welfare state performance, such as the economic and refugee crises, do not appear on the political horizon exactly at the same time, but rather in sequence. Second, when testing the moderating effect of these crises on the relationship between welfare state performance and political trust, we take into account the heterogeneity between countries. European countries have different experiences with respect to the timing, severity, and consequences of these various international crises. Third, we also take into account the heterogeneity within countries where people may attach more or less salience to decreasing welfare state performance, depending on self-interest or ideological values. We test this conditionality using pioneering between-within countries design that models between-countries and within-country effects simultaneously. We thereby rely on the currently most up to date, encompassing, and suitable data source: the European Social Survey 2008-2016.