Zero-Sum Thinking, Redistributive Policies, and Political Trust: a Psychlogical Benchmark

This paper offers novel theoretical and empirical insights on how Zero-Sum Thinking (ZST) – the belief that one party’s gains are accrued at other parties’ expense – influences trust towards political institutions by acting as a benchmark for trust as an evaluative process when there are changes in redistributive policies. Although both ZST and political trust are widely studied in their respective fields of psychology and political science, this paper joins together expectations from these two literatures, providing – to the best of my knowledge – the first exploration of how ZST affects trust in political institutions when reforms in redistributive policies are enacted. Prior research shows that ZST informs policy preferences and interpretations of economic exchanges, while research in political trust highlights the relevancy of economic policies and the saliency of individual benchmarks for the formation of political trust. On the basis of these findings, this paper offers a theoretical framework which links one’s psychological tendency to viewing economic interactions as zero-sum to the interpretation of government behavior when reforms in redistributive policies are implemented. Since ZST leads to viewing resources as fixed, any economic exchange is conceptualized as inherently competitive, since in this view wealth cannot be augmented but only accumulated at someone else's expense. When cuts in redistributive policies – such as subsidies or transfers – are enacted, the more one’s propensity towards ZST, the more the government is seen as a competitive agent, and therefore inherently unreliable. Distrust thus emerges among individuals with a zero-sum outlook on economic exchanges when redistributive measures are cut, acting as a psychological benchmark for political trust. This hypothesis is tested using data from four World Value Survey (WVS) waves and the World Bank WDI dataset, providing both correlational and causal evidence. Cross-national correlational evidence shows that ZST is negatively and significantly related to political trust when redistributive measures decrease as a percentage of GDP, suggesting that the phenomenon has a wide relevance across different countries. Causal evidence exploits the case study of Egypt in 2013, when subsidies to flour and bread were cut by the government during the WVS 6 fieldwork dates in the country. This negative policy shock was employed to compare the effect of ZST on political trust before and after the cut to subsidies, revealing that the decrease in political trust is significantly bigger among individuals viewing economic interactions as zero-sum after the shock. This evidence is robust to multiple tests and hints at the relevancy of ZST as an individual benchmark for political trust formation when reforms in redistributive policies are enacted.