Affective underpinnings of political trust: who are the distrustful and why?

The belief that strong political trust and political engagement are always good for democracy has been shaken. It seems to matter more what kind of government people support. The resentful antiliberal far-right (populist) party supporter is a prototype of a person who perceives a distance towards government, is unsatisfied with democracy, and distrustful of its institutions. However, this mixes up many different factors: grievances, values and attitudes, and party preferences. They are related, but not all grievances translate into illiberal values and far-right voting. Based on an unique data set including six European countries (Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Germany), we disentangle these different factors and clarify which is the most important determinant of political trust or whether combinations of these factors better explains (lack of) political trust. On the individual level, we focus on these variables: 1) resentment and discrete emotions felt towards politics, 2) political attitudes and values, 3) party support and voting. Since political participation might by enhanced by grievances but also negatively related to the lack of support for democracy, we include non-institutionalized forms of 4) political participation into our analyses to also test possible moderation effects: Does political participation increase or decrease the impact of grievances on political trust? In the second step of our analyses, we will also delve deeper into the specific countries in our sample in order to understand how the national context is changing previously mentioned patterns. The main assumption of our country analyses is that if grievances are taken seriously by the government, some of the above-described patterns might be reversed: Resentful far-right supporting people might trust the government (again), and liberal citizens are not inclined to trust antiliberal government.