What You Get is What You Give? Personal Experience and Political Trust: Examining the Causal Mechanism Underlying Policy Feedback

Do citizens punish their governments if the economy is doing badly? Scholars have proposed an evaluative-mechanism driving political trust, where citizens evaluate the government depending on egotropic and sociotropic evaluations of particularly economic outcomes. Yet, establishing causality from satisfaction with government performance to political trust has been a serious challenge, as recognized by many scholars (e.g. Bartels and Achen 2004; Norris 2011). Not only can causality be reversed, where citizens better evaluate performance based on a positive image of the government, there are also numerous of possible confounding variables. The aim of this article is to shed light on the causal relationship between citizens’ satisfaction with their financial situation and their levels of political trust. We tackle the challenge of endogeneity with a novel research design: using Dutch survey data linked to register data, we employ a regression discontinuity design with citizens who were just (un)fortunate enough to (not) receive social benefits, either because they just turned 18, or are about to, or because their earnings are close to the income limit. First, we test whether receivers and non-receivers differ in their political trust. In addition, we analyze whether receivers and non-receivers vary in their financial satisfaction and therefore hold more or less trust in the national government. We predict that one’s financial situation is used as a heuristic to judge how the economy is doing overall, and that changes therein affect one’s political trust.