Is Political Trust Necessary for Democracy? Cross-National Evidence on Democratic Support

Recent studies document a strong, negative and robust relationship between democracy and political trust—including trust in non-partisan political institutions that are largely independent from incumbent officeholders. What remains unsettled, however, is whether low political trust—particularly in non-partisan institutions—poses a genuine threat to democracy or instead reflects a normal and potentially healthy feature of democratic governance. The critical citizens thesis suggests that declining political trust is unlikely to undermine democratic stability, as trust tends to be weakly related to more diffuse forms of political support, such as support for the principle of democracy. Yet recent declines in democratic support in established democracies, together with emerging cross-national evidence, suggest that political trust and democratic support may be more closely connected than previously assumed. In this paper, we empirically examine the relationship between political trust and support for democracy using data from the World Values Survey, the European Values Study, and other sources. We conduct multilevel analyses covering 71 countries over the period 2005–2022. Across a wide range of model specifications, we find that political trust is not only positively associated with support for democracy but is also one of its strongest predictors. To address concerns about measurement non-equivalence arising from cross-national variation in democratic understanding, we further test this relationship by controlling the extent to which respondents’ assessments of their country’s level of democracy closely align with the V-Dem polyarchy measure. The positive association remains robust under this specification. Taken together, these findings suggest that low political trust—especially in non-partisan institutions—may be more closely tied to diffuse democratic support than much of the existing literature implies, and therefore more problematic for democratic stability than the critical citizens perspective suggests.