The Impact of Political Factors on Developing Political Trust in Multilevel Political Systems

Contemporary citizens live in multilevel political systems, comprising not only of municipalities, but also of regions, national and supranational governments. So far little attention has been given to the impact of this oftentimes highly complex institutional context on the ways in which citizens develop important political orientations, like their trust in the various tiers of government. In our paper we will focus on two questions. First: To what extent do citizens differentiate in their political trust attitudes between different levels of governance? Some theoretical arguments imply that citizens hardly differentiate in their attitudes towards various political institutions (either because of the dominance of national politics – as is implied by the theory of second-order elections; or because of lack of political interest and knowledge; as is implied in the theory of cognitive minimalism). Yet, there has been hardly any research investigating the matter of (non-) differentiation in political orientations in multilevel governance systems. Our preliminary results indicate that (to a certain extent and amongst segments of the population) there is differentiation Therefore we also ask a subsequent question: To what extent is people’s local political trust affected by people’s political orientations and relations to national and supranational rather than their own local political system? We answer these questions on the basis of the data from the second Dutch Local Election Studies 2018 (currently Giedo Jansen and Bas Denters are responsible for the DLES). In the DLES2018 citizens were asked about their trust in three levels of governance simultaneously: local, national and the European, and their political orientations to different tiers of government. Hence the DLES is well-suited for answering our research questions.