Does Political Trust Strengthen Democracy? A Cross-National Longitudinal Analysis

Political trust is widely considered essential for democracy, but empirical evidence testing this hypothesis remains limited. Building on research on political trust as related to democratic legitimacy and on trust’s attitudinal and behavioral consequences, we formulate expectations about longitudinal effects of political trust on democracy. Our primary hypothesis is that political trust has a positive effect on subsequent changes in democratic quality, but only in countries that have already achieved some level of democracy. To test this hypothesis, we employ Bayesian latent trend analysis to estimate a time series of political trust for 62 countries over 30 years. We fit lagged variable models to the trust time series combined with democracy measures from the Varieties of Democracy project and economic indicators. We find little evidence of an overall effect of trust on democracy, and stronger evidence for a positive effect among already democratic countries.