Do leopards ever change their spots? The development of political trust among Swedish Green Party sympathisers

Abstract

Although starting out as a protest movement in the early 1980s, the Swedish Greens moved to become a contractual supporter of Social Democratic governments from 1998 to 2006, and then became an active partner of the Red–Green Coalition seeking parliamentary power in the 2010 general elections. Against the background of lingering strife between ‘fundis’ and ‘realos’ in Green parties, national survey data is used to analyse how this shift from anti- to pro-system party has affected political trust among Swedish Green sympathisers. Although the general level of political trust among Green sympathisers goes up during the period of ever closer cooperation with the Social Democrats, the effect of being a Green Party sympathiser remains negatively associated with political trust regardless of proximity to power. Possible explanations of this pattern, which seems exclusively attached to former anti-parties, are discussed.

Keywords:

• political trust
• green parties
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

This article derives from the research project ‘The Ecological Citizen: An Empirical and Theoretical Study of the Prospects for Ecological Citizenship’ at University of Gothenburg, financed by the Swedish Research Council. The authors wish to thank Staffan Kumlin and the anonymous referees for excellent advice and comments.

Notes

1. The mean values of both these variables are quite stable over time in the total sample. Trust in politicians varies between 2.0–2.3 on the 1–4 scale. Satisfaction with democracy varies between 2.7–2.9 on the 1–4 scale.

2. Cronbach's Alpha: 2000 = 0.65; 2001 = 0.62; 2002 = 0.67; 2003 = 0.67; 2004 = 0.71; 2005 = 0.67; 2006 = 0.64; 2007 = 0.64; 2008 = 0.67; 2009 = 0.70.

3. The size of the surveys varies between years. Moreover, the surveys are split into two separate selections with only partly overlapping questions. In reality, the selection for each year is thus around 3000 persons, and the gross response rate varies between 60 to 70%.

4. It should also be noted that the standard error of the mean of ‘very interested’ group in 2004 is quite large, as there were only 34 people fitting that category in the 2004 survey.

5. The full OLS models are reported in Table A2 in the Appendix.

6. There is no effect of pro-system party sympathy in the election year 2006.

7. Only five weeks after the September 2006 elections, the Greens openly stated that they would prefer leaving the coalition and going it alone in Parliament (Svenska Dagbladet 2010b).