Unpacking the Trust Mechanism Within Liberal Nationalism: National Pride, Trust, and Support for Income Equality

Do citizens’ levels of trust explain the nexus of nationalism and support for redistribution? Much of the existing literature, particularly in the field of liberal nationalism, digs out various patterns of the relationship between nationalism and redistribution justice, the effect of nationalism on trust, and how trust correlates with preferences to redistributive policies, respectively. However, quite few studies have examined the mechanism function of trust in between nationalism and support for redistribution empirically. I therefore propose and test a dual-path mediation model in which social trust and political trust mediate the effect of nationalism on redistributive preferences. Building on theories of liberal nationalism, I expect both forms of trust to mediate such a relationship. More specifically, nationalism increases both social trust and political trust, thus raising individual’s support for redistribution. Using data from the UK and the Netherlands (European Values Study 2017) and the US (World Values Survey), I find another different picture: national pride, as a key psychological element of nationalism, erodes public support for equal income via enhancing their confidence in government, while interpersonal trust fails to explain this nexus. This result challenges the theoretical expectations held by liberal nationalists in two folds. Firstly, whether such a mechanism of trust exists depends on what type of trust one is looking at. Secondly, national pride and political trust may not necessarily bring support for redistribution policies, especially in those well-functioning welfare states or in countries without a welfare tradition. For the former case, when people feel proud of and satisfied with their long-standing welfare policy and institutions who carried out it, they are less likely to see inequality as stemming from malfunctioning systems needing correction. For the latter, national pride can emphasize achievement, meritocratic narratives, and system justification, thereby legitimizing existing hierarchies and deemphasizing redistribution as a solution.