The Macro-Level Consequences of Political Trust for the Quality of Democracy

Much political trust research is motivated by its potential consequences for the quality of democracy. Yet, remarkably, empirical tests of these consequences have remained scarce. This paper benefits from decades of cross-national and longitudinal surveys measuring trust in political institutions, to shed light on this relationship. Theoretically, we distinguish between three rivalling theories on the macro-level consequences of political trust: (1) distrust as a risk to democratic resilience; (2) distrust as a motivator for institutional change within democracies; and (3) distrust as an indicator but not a cause of democratic distress. Methodologically, we employ Bayesian latent trend modelling on a large number of surveys across the globe to help identify relationships.