Evaluating State Institutions In Early Adolescence: How Cognitive Resources Shape The Relationship Between Democratic Quality And Institutional Trust

Institutional trust is largely a relational attitude shaped by the characteristics of both the truster (i.e., the citizen) and the trustee (i.e., state institutions and representatives). While earlier empirical research on cross-national differences in trust levels often focused on either individual or institutional explanations, recent scholarship has sought to identify the mechanisms that connect macro-level indicators of democratic performance with individual-level trust attitudes. A key mediator in this process is citizens’ subjective evaluations of state institutions and political actors. Specifically, for institutional malperformance to erode institutional trust, citizens must first recognize these performance shortcomings, translated into lower evaluations of institutional functioning in terms of competence, integrity, or accountability. However, not all citizens possess the resources to accurately assess institutional performance or to be normatively troubled by institutional failings or corruption. Political knowledge, for instance, enhances individuals’ ability to critically and accurately evaluate procedural performance. Similarly, diffuse support for the political system or norms of good democratic governance shape how individuals perceive and react to institutional flaws. For example, citizens who fail to perceive the arrests of critical opposition leaders as a threat to democracy might not withdraw trust despite such events. These dynamics particularly raise questions about whether the relational and evaluative aspects of institutional trust observed in adults also extend to adolescents. Adolescents are still in a formative stage of political socialization, where they are developing the cognitive resources necessary to critically assess institutional performance. Lower political knowledge could mean that adolescents are less aware of institutional flaws or their implications. Furthermore, adolescents typically have fewer opportunities to directly engage with political institutions or observe their functioning, which might limit their ability to gather information and form evaluative judgments. Finally, adolescents might also exhibit a less nuanced understanding of good democratic governance than adults, potentially viewing issues like corruption as less significant threats to democracy. Hence, understanding these differences in cognitive and experiential resources between adolescents and adults is essential for investigating how institutional trust develops during early life stages, particularly since trust seems to fluctuate during adolescence before becoming more stable in adulthood. This study addresses this question by examining how objective indicators of democratic quality influence adolescents’ evaluations of democratic performance and, in turn, their trust in state institutions. Using multi-level moderated mediation models, we analyse data from the 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2022), which surveys the democratic values, attitudes, and behaviours of eighth-grade students across 24 countries across the globe. Measures of democratic quality are drawn from the V-Dem project and World Development Indicators to provide robust contextual information. Preliminary findings indicate that democratic performance influences adolescents’ institutional trust through mechanisms similar to those observed in adults. Specifically, while macro-level indicators of democratic quality shape adolescents’ evaluations of democratic performance, the strength of this indirect effect varies. Adolescents with higher political knowledge and more diffuse support for democratic norms and ideals are more likely to perceive and respond to flaws in democratic quality, translated into lower institutional trust.