The trade-off between political trust and voice behaviour

This paper aims to explore the possibility of a parabolic relationship between citizens' trust in government and their propensity to engage in voice behaviour, such as voting or protest. Trust and voice are both of interest in public administration, but the relationship between the two remains unclear. However, drawing on the trust and voice literature (e.g. Hirschman 1970; Hooghe and Marien 2013; James and Moseley 2014; Porumbescu 2017; Barrows 2015; Chen et al. 2021), we argue that trust and voice could sometimes be in tension with one another. Very low and very high levels of trust in government could both reduce citizens’ propensity to express their voice, through apathy and disinterest in the prior case and complacency in the latter case. Citizens may view voice behaviour as futile at low levels of trust and unnecessary at high levels. This paper utilizes data from Round 8 of the European Social Survey (ESS) to investigate whether a parabolic relationship can be established. Results from negative binomial regression analysis suggest that although greater trust in government is predictive of higher rates of voice behaviour, very high levels of trust are associated with a decrease in voice behaviour. This drop-off effect is partially accounted for by variation between different European country groups. To the author's knowledge, a parabolic relationship between citizen trust and voice has not previously been proposed in the literature. The results partially support the view that there is a parabolic relationship between trust in government and voice behaviour, but further research is required to explore the relationship. The trust-voice trade-off illustrates one way in which policy choices may have unexpected consequences which policymakers should consider.