Explaining the decline of political trust in Australia

ABSTRACT

In most established democracies, trends in political trust in recent decades have fluctuated, but have not declined strongly. Citizens’ democratic attitudes in many countries have even proven to be resilient in the face of the Great Recession. Such trends contrast sharply with the observation of a gradual and continued decline of Australian’s trust in politics since 2007. Using a combined file of seven Australian Election Study surveys, employing exactly comparable questions and methodologies, this paper tests two explanations – government performance and political detachment – to account for this remarkable decline. The findings show that both a lack of performance by successive governments and a broad detachment from politics matter. The findings suggest that there is no single explanation for the decline; rather, a diverse range of inter-related factors appear to be at work.

在大多数成熟的民主国家，近数十年的政治信任有起伏却无锐减。面对大萧条，许多国家的公民对民主的态度显示出弹性。这种情况与观察到的2007年以来澳大利亚公民对政党信任的每下愈况成明显反差。本文作者合并七项澳大利亚选举调查数据，并使用完全可比的问题及方法，对两种解释这种衰减的理论——政府表现和政治疏离——做了验证。根据我们的研究，连续几届政府的表现不佳以及广泛的政治疏离确实发生了影响，但原因并不单一，各种内在相关的因素共同起了作用。

KEYWORDS:

• Political trust
• populism
• critical citizens
• government performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The other two OECD countries were Canada and Japan.

2 The other established democracy with compulsory voting in Belgium, and the other countries with three year parliaments are Mexico and the Philippines. Almost all of the remaining countries which have a bicameral system have four or five year parliaments. See https://www.ipu.org/

3 Between 1983 and 2007 Australia had just three prime ministers. Between 2007 and 2018 there were six prime ministers, none of whom served a full term. Over that period there were eight leadership spills, of which four were successful.

4 The time series could not be extended back from 2001 because not of all of the items of interest were available in the earlier surveys.

5 In 2001 the two leaders were John Howard, Kim Beazley; 2004 John Howard and Mark Latham; 2007 John Howard and Kevin Rudd; 2010; Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott; 2013 Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd; 2016 Malcom Turnbull and Bill Shorten; and 2019 Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten.

6 A scale was also created measuring the degree of honesty each of the two leaders was considered to have, but since it produced largely the same findings as the popularity measure, this was used instead.

7 Preliminary analyses examined other aspects of education, including post-secondary qualifications and a graduate degree. However, the major political impact of education was found to be in the form of tertiary education, confirming other research (Weakliem 2002).

8 The Silent Generation is preceded by the Great Generation (born before 1938) but in practice there are few in this category and they have been combined with the Silent Generation. Similarly, Generation Z were born after 1996 but given their small numbers they are included with the Millennials.

9 Formally, the stepwise inclusion of independent variables in a model that already includes time-effects allows us to verify whether between-survey variation in levels of trust is explained by between-survey variation in the levels of the independent variables. Note that interacting the independent variables with a time indicator would not shed light on such mediation effects, but would instead inform us whether the effects of some of the independent variables on political trust has changed over time. We have no expectations about change in the effects of government performance or detachment over time. Instead, our expectation is that over-time variation in levels of citizens’ evaluations of government performance and detachment correlate with over-time variation in levels of political trust, hence the mediation approach.

10 In particular, based on the estimates from model 3, we find that a respondent who gives the major party leaders an average rating of 3 has an estimated level of political trust of 1.96. Levels of trust increase to 2.12 for those giving major party leaders a rating of 5 on average, and to 2.52 for those giving the maximum rating (10) to the two party leaders.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Dassonneville

Ruth Dassonneville is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy.

Ian McAllister

Ian McAllister is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The Australian National University and a director of the Australian Election Study.