Although the debate on roots and causes of political trust is ongoing, many scholars agree about the relevance of such political factors as institutional performance, political responsiveness and political/ideological distance between the citizens and governmental incumbents. Still, no study to this day investigated and compared the relevance of those factors across three levels of a multilevel governance system (EU, national and local government). In this paper, we hypothesise (1) that political trust is specific (i.e. depends on characteristics of the political incumbents at a given level of governance) and 2) that the effects of such characteristics becomes stronger the closer the given level of governance is from a citizens’ perspective. We test our hypotheses on data collected through the Dutch Local Election Studies 2018, which were later on complemented with additional questions following the European Parliament elections in May 2019.
