Do Not Trust the Elite! Correlates among Populist Attitudes and Trust in Politics and Media in Four Western European Countries

Europe is currently experiencing turbulent times. At latest since the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, populist parties are on the rise. Populism is described as a thin ideology (Mudde, 2004), where a homogenous in-group (the people) stand opposed to the so-called elite, which is represented especially through the government and the media (Kriesi, 2018). Populist actors aim at restoring the sovereignty of the ‘common people’. Thus, citizens’ populist attitudes, are typ-ically assessed via three main factors: (1) anti-elitism, (2) the demand for people’s sovereignty (e.g. by people’s votes) and (3) the perception of the people as an homogenous group (Schulz et al., 2018). Even though much research is devoted to identifying causes and effects of populistic attitudes (f.e. Müller et al., 2017; Spierings & Zaslove, 2017), the concept of institutional trust is only rarely addressed. Yet, as institutions such as government, parliament and the media are largely considered to represent the elite, we argue that low levels of trust in those institutions are associated with high levels of populist attitudes. Furthermore, empirical research suggests that people’s evaluations of leading politicians are a strong predictor of political trust (Marcinkowski & Starke, 2018). Thus, we assume that the correlation between institutional trust and anti-elitism is particularly high. To test our hypotheses, we use representative random-sample data from a large cross-national survey (Germany, France, Switzerland, United Kingdom) conducted in 2015 (n = 4033). Populist attitudes were measured with two item for each of the aforementioned dimen-sions. Trust in parliament, government and the media were assessed with single-items. In our analysis we correlated each populist-dimension with each trust dimension for each country. The results suggest that firstly, for all countries we find relatively strong correlations between trust in political institutions (parliament and government) and anti-elitism, r=.283 to .495, whereas the link between trust in media and anti-elitism is also significant but substantially weaker, r=.151 to .271. Secondly, demand for people’s sovereignty also correlates with the trust items in a similar way. Again, trust in political institutions show significantly higher effect sizes, r=.261 to .482, that trust in media, r=.097 to .219. Notably, Swiss citizens differ from the others as only trust in government correlates weakly with this dimension, r=.151. One plausi-ble argument to explain this finding is that people’s vote are a central part in Swiss politics. Thirdly, the perception of people as a homogenous group correlates weakly, sometimes even non-significant with the trust dimensions, r=.034 to .227. Comparing the sizes of the correlations coefficients, we see that connections between populist attitudes and trust in elites are highest among German citizens, moderate among British and French citizens and somewhat inconstant among Swiss citizens. Overall, our results show that there is a connection between trust in elites and populist attitudes. However, there are substantial cross-national as well as elite-wise differences between the strength of correlations, which might be partly explained through national characteristics. The findings suggest that winning back citizens’ trust is essential for political institutions to counter the rise of populist attitudes in Europe.