The Role of Generalised Trust in Individual Preference for the Populist Radical Right

Recently, the electoral preference for the populist radical right (PRR) has been increasing across the European political landscape. This has manifested itself as an electoral victory for the PRR parties in younger democracies such as Hungary and Poland, and strong contestation of the main-stream parties in established democracies such as France and Germany. The conventional wisdom of electoral studies explains these outcomes in terms of changing political cleavages induced by globalization. However, these explanations fall short in explaining the epidemic-like spread of the preference for the populist radical right across diverse political landscapes with varying degree of globalization. This gap, so far, has been bridged to a certain extent by the political psychology scholars by studying the role of personality traits in the party preference. However, existing scholarly work also falls short in three regards. Firstly, the existing literature has been limited to Big Five personality traits with the addition of Social Dominance Orientation(SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism(RWA) Secondly, the existing scholarly work has mostly demonstrated the connection between the personality traits and party preference with limited focus on causal chain between personality traits, political attitudes, and preference. Secondly, to my knowledge, existing works lack a cross-sectional analysis of such a widespread phenomenon This paper aims to contribute to the literature by filling these gaps in three ways. Firstly, I draw attention to generalized trust as a politically relevant stable personality trait by asking “what is the role of the generalized trust in an individual's preference for the PRR parties?”. Secondly, I aim to establish a causal chain between personality traits, attitudes, and preferences by “What is the causal mechanism through which generalized trust influences an individual’s preference for the PRR parties?”. Lastly, I aim to investigate these questions in a cross-sectional design by utilizing the European Social Survey(ESS). The generalized trust is the trust for people with whom there is no personal contact. In other words, a strong generalized trust means that the attitude of trust goes beyond the boundaries of kinship, friendship, and acquaintance. Based on this definition, I initially hypothesize that it can influence the preference by determining the individual's attitude toward immigrants. In other words, people with stronger generalized trust would have a weaker preference for PRR parties because they have a more positive attitude toward immigrants. Preliminary results from the analysis of ESS wave 7 indicate that this is the case. However, the preliminary results also show that attitude toward immigrants is not the only causal pathway for the generalized trust because the causal mediation analysis indicates a direct effect as well. Thus, I hypothesize a second causal pathway. As a determinant of whether individuals perceive strangers as a threat or an opportunity, people with stronger generalized trust should have a positive attitude toward supra-national institutions that facilitate international cooperation. If this is the case, people with stronger generalized trust should have a weaker preference the PRR parties which prescribes anti-internationalist policies. This hypothesis remains to be tested.