Two Faces of Trust: How Political Trust Shapes Responses to Democratic Policy Costs

Political trust is widely regarded as a prerequisite for democratic stability due to its heuristic function: it enables citizens to support important policies involving costs and risks. While this heuristic role is often seen as beneficial for democracy, not all policy costs are equally benign. In particular, the growing prevalence of so-called democratic policy costs – policies enacted at the expense of democratic principles – raises new questions about the role of trust in democratic stability. If political trust also reduces resistance to democratic costs, it may reveal a normative dualism: trust may both stabilize and endanger democracy. Yet, this question has remained a significant blind spot in the literature. This study addresses this gap by examining how both the level and type of political trust – distinguishing between evaluative and dispositional trust – shape public responses to material versus democratic policy costs. Using a large-scale vignette experiment conducted in eight European democracies (United Kingdom, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Sweden; N=22,071) and newly developed multidimensional political trust measures, we show that high political trust decreases opposition to material costs but increases sensitivity to democratic costs. Importantly, evaluative trusters are more likely to penalize democratic violations than their dispositional counterparts. This suggests a cognitive dualism at the heart of political trust: trust shapes citizen responses in systematically different ways depending on the type of policy cost and the way citizens trust. These findings bear important implications for our understanding of the role of political trust in democratic resilience.