Political trust and polarization during election campaigns - a reinforcing spiral?

A decline in political trust and a rise in polarization are argued to be key features of current Western democratic societies (Van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017; Reiljan, 2020). The relationship between the two is notably underexplored – while they might be mutually dependent. A lack of political trust might yield increases in levels of affective polarization (i.e. disliking political "others"), while higher levels of polarization might erode the confidence individual citizens’ have in the political system and political institutions, thus yielding a reinforcing spiral (Shehata et al., 2024). These dynamics are likely to be particularly present during election campaigns, when political information is abundantly present and voters are confronted with politicians that try to influence their opinions and voting behavior by explicating the differences between them and other candidates (Maier and Nai, 2020). Moreover, during election campaigns, more critical statements are made about the functioning of the current government and/or institutions (by opposition parties) than during routine periods which might affect trust (Seeberg, 2020). In this paper, we explore the interactions between political trust and affective polarization during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary election campaign, that took place on November 22. The elections resulted in a major victory for the right-wing populist party Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) which makes the Dutch case particularly interesting with regard to political trust and polarization. Relying on data collected in a seven-wave panel survey (N=2,500) including a wide range of questions on affective polarization (in particular feelings towards parties and voters from parties) as well as (institutional) political trust, we test the reinforcing spiral notion by means of random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM), extended with linear slopes to test for growth trajectories. Finally, we investigate how the interaction between polarization and trust depends on (social) media use and thus establish how certain (social) media (de)fuel spirals.