The ‘Meso-Level’ as a Lens to Evaluate Politics: How Economic Performance at Different Geographic Levels and in Different Sectors of the Economy Can Affect Individuals’ Political Trust

The literature on the evaluative approach to political trust suffers from a so-called macro-micro paradox: there consistent empirical evidence for cross-national and longitudinal object-driven causes of political trust, but weak evidence for the micro-level mechanisms that are assumed to explain these effects (Van der Meer, 2018). That is, macro-effects of political performance – often operationalized as macro-economic performance (e.g. unemployment rate, economic growth, etc.) – on individuals’ political trust are hardly explained by individuals’ subjective performance evaluations. Whether these subjective evaluations are sociotropic (e.g. perceptions of the state of the economy) or egotropic (e.g. perceptions of own job security), they often do not explain the association between macro-level economic performance and micro-level political trust. In this paper we aim to contribute to further understanding of this paradox by closely examining the meso-level between national economic performance and individual-level political trust. Theoretically, it could be that individuals not only evaluate the macro-level outcomes, but additionally evaluate the meso-level outcomes of (economic) policy, and/or that the evaluations of the macro-level depend on the meso-level performance. The current paper examines this meso-level along two dimensions. First, we study how economic indicators at different geographic levels can explain individuals’ subjective perceptions and eventually their political trust, by looking at regional, municipal and neighbourhood-level indicators. Second, we analyse economic indicators at different sectoral levels corresponding to individuals’ occupational sectors, and how this shapes individuals’ subjective perceptions and their political trust. To do so we make use of the Dutch LISS panel data that includes observations of approximately 7,500 individuals over 16 annual waves that were gathered between 2008 and 2024, in which questions about political trust and subjective evaluations have been repeatedly asked. We link these data to detailed statistics covering the same time span about economic indicators at different geographic levels and in different economic sectors, provided by Statistics Netherlands. Modelling the effects of over-time change in these meso-level indicators on within-individual changes in political trust helps us to shed further light on macro-to-micro mechanisms.