http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6044-2810
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ABSTRACT
This article explores political trust, delving into its subcomponents and the relationship between them. It is interested in explaining why governmental trust and trust in regulative state institutions are similar in some countries and different in others. It argues that the variation can best be explained by checks on the executive. This is the case because the more restricted the executive, the less regulative state institutions are affected by the fluctuations in governmental trust. When the government cannot encroach upon state institutions, the impartiality and efficacy of regulative institutions are maintained. The less governmental interference to regulative state institutions, the more such institutions will be devoted to the public rather than partisan interests, resulting in a wider gap between state and government trust. The argument is tested through an empirical analysis of a cross-national panel data based on all existing waves of the World Values Survey.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Kursat Cinar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6044-2810
Meral Ugur-Cinar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2195-4861
Notes
1 Miller and Listhaug, “Political Parties and Confidence in Government”; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices; Dalton and Weldon, “Public Images of Political Parties”; Della Porta, “Democracy and Distrust”; Norris, Democratic Deficit; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe”; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe”; Hooghe and Marien, “A Comparative Analysis of the Relation Between Political Trust and Forms of Political Participation”; Bauer and Fatke, “Direct Democracy and Political Trust”; Ignazi, “Power and the (Il)legitimacy of Political Parties.”
2 Adams, Ezrow, and Somer-Topcu, “Do Voters Respond to Party Manifestos?”; Dalton and Weldon, “Public Images of Political Parties”; Della Porta, “Democracy and Distrust”; Hooghe and Marien, “A Comparative Analysis of the Relation Between Political Trust and Forms of Political Participation”; Ignazi, “Power and the (Il)legitimacy of Political Parties.”
3 Levi and Stoker, “Political Trust and Trustworthiness”; Bouckaert and Van de Walle, “Comparing Measures of Citizen Trust”; Turper and Aarts, “Political Trust and Sophistication”; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe”; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”
4 Van der Meer and Dekker, “Trustworthy States, Trusting Citizens?,” 95.
5 Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 8; Bouckaert and Van de Walle, “Comparing Measures of Citizen Trust,” 333; Hooghe and Marien, “A Comparative Analysis of the Relation Between Political Trust and Forms of Political Participation,” 133; see also Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices; Della Porta, “Democracy and Distrust”; Marien, “Measuring Political Trust Across Time and Space.”
6 Marien, “Measuring Political Trust Across Time and Space,” 17.
7 Bouckaert and Van de Walle, “Comparing Measures of Citizen Trust,” 339; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe,” 112; See also, Levi and Stoker, “Political Trust and Trustworthiness”; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe.”
8 For a selection of studies which use a single additive index for political trust, see Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins of Political Trust?”; Anderson and Singer, “The Sensitive Left and the Impervious Right”; Newton and Zmerli, “Three Forms of Trust”; Hooghe and Marien, “A Comparative Analysis of the Relation Between Political Trust and Forms of Political Participation”; Marien, “Measuring Political Trust Across Time and Space”; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe.”
9 Norris, Critical Citizens.
10 DeVellis, Scale Development, 109–110.
11 Hakhverdian and Mayne, “Institutional Trust, Education, and Corruption”; Hooghe and Marien, “A Comparative Analysis of the Relation Between Political Trust and Forms of Political Participation.”
12 Turper and Aarts, “Political Trust and Sophistication.”
13 Dalton and Weldon, “Public Images of Political Parties”; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe”; Bauer and Fatke, “Direct Democracy and Political Trust.”
14 Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices.
15 Schneider, “Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust?”
16 Denters, Gabriel, and Torcal, “Political Confidence in Representative Democracies.”
17 Torcal, “Political Trust in Western and Southern Europe.”
18 Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins of Political Trust?”; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe”; Bauer and Fatke, “Direct Democracy and Political Trust.”
19 Easton, “A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support.”
20 Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”
21 For a similar argument, see McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe.” We should note that according to Easton (“A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support”) all political institutions present at the same time depend on specific and diffuse support. However, performative political institutions such as government should depend more on specific support, which is based on citizens’ assessments of political institutions’ performance such as ensuring good governance and economic growth, whereas trust in regulative state institutions more heavily depends on longer time horizons, showing more stable attitudes than performative representative political institutions.
22 Miller and Listhaug, “Political Parties and Confidence in Government,” 385; Marien, “Measuring Political Trust Across Time and Space,” 36.
23 For other papers questioning the unidimensionality of political trust in European countries, see Denters, Gabriel, and Torcal, “Political Confidence in Representative Democracies”; and Torcal, “Political Trust in Western and Southern Europe.” As Godefroidt et al. argue, we need more “comparative, representative, comprehensive, and longitudinal studies beyond the established democracies” to understand the determinants of trust. Godefroidt, Langer, and Meuleman, “Developing Political Trust in a Developing Country,” 919.
24 The first WVS wave was published in 1981–1984, the second in 1990–1994, the third in 1995–1999, the fourth in 2000–2004, the fifth in 2005–2009, the sixth in 2010–2014. All of the WVS can be found at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp.
25 The other options in the WVS waves regarding the trust (confidence) in governmental and state institutions are “not very much,” “none at all,” and “no answer.” “No answer” responses are negligible for all of the countries included in the dataset, hovering around 1% (below in almost all cases).
26 Marien, “Measuring Political Trust Across Time and Space”; Schneider, “Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust?”
27 We should underline that the existence and relative weights of different notions such as transparency, participation, efficacy, and satisfaction with service delivery regarding the conceptualization of political trust under democratic versus authoritarian settings need to be seen in a continuum. It is true that satisfaction with service delivery is crucial in all regime types, democratic or not. In a similar vein, citizens in authoritarian countries may also desire political accountability and transparency, yet it is hard to capture those sentiments due to preference falsification. All in all, rather than their total existence or lack thereof, each sub-notion about political trust has gradations under different political settings, which makes it harder to compare democratic versus authoritarian countries.
28 Aleman and Woods, “Value Orientations from the World Values Survey.” In a cross-national study which combines democratic and authoritarian nations, Schneider (“Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust?”) underlines that authoritarian countries appear to be the most trusting of government and have high factor loadings for both representative and regulative political institutions (that is, citizens tend to conflate these institutions together in their trust judgements). While she argues that there are also differences among democratic nations (specifically between post-communist versus Western nations), this does not render cross-national comparisons among democratic nations impossible, whereas comparisons between democratic and authoritarian states are inappropriate as political institutions in these states have utterly different roles, functions, and trust judgements in the eyes of the citizens.
29 Kitschelt and Wilkinson, Patrons, Clients, and Policies.
30 Bouckaert and Van de Walle, “Comparing Measures of Citizen Trust.”
31 Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies; Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination.
32 Rose, “Perspectives on Political Behavior”; Darden and Grzymala-Busse, “The Great Divide.”
33 Jiang and Yang, “Lying or Believing?”
34 Freedom House categorizes countries under the labels of “free,” “partly free,” and “not free.” One could argue that some of the problems associated with “not free” cases could also apply to “partly free” cases. To account for this possibility, we run robustness tests for “free” and “partly free” countries separately and we find that our hypothesized relationship between executive constraints and political trust hold for each group of countries separately (see section called Robustness Checks).
35 The countries that have experienced such transitions (from “partly free” to “not free” or vice versa) and that have been included in this study are Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Russia, and Tunisia. The article considers data for these countries if and only if these countries are considered at least “partially free” for the relevant time of the WVS survey.
36 Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
37 Ibid., 46.
38 Criado and Herreros, “Political Support”; Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins of Political Trust?”; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe”; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”
39 Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins of Political Trust?”
40 Freitag and Bühlmann, “Crafting Trust”; Kelleher and Wolak, “Explaining Public Confidence”; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe”; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”
41 Freitag and Bühlmann, “Crafting Trust,” 1545.
42 Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”
43 Anderson and Singer, “The Sensitive Left and the Impervious Right”; Freitag and Bühlmann, “Crafting Trust”; Turper and Aarts, “Political Trust and Sophistication.”
44 Seligson, “The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy.”
45 Hakhverdian and Mayne, “Institutional Trust, Education, and Corruption.”
46 Turper and Aarts, “Political Trust and Sophistication,” 3–4.
47 Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization; Norris, Democratic Deficit; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices.
48 Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe,” 112.
49 Barro and Lee, “A New Data Set of Educational Attainment.”
50 Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent; Van der Meer and Dekker, “Trustworthy States, Trusting Citizens?”
51 Freitag and Bühlmann, “Crafting Trust.”
52 Norris, Critical Citizens.
53 Criado and Herreros, “Political Support,” 1512.
54 Norris, Critical Citizens, 223.
55 Norris, Democracy Time-series Dataset.
56 Elazar, “Contrasting Unitary and Federal Systems.”
57 Norris, Critical Citizens; Criado and Herreros, “Political Support.”
58 Delhey and Newton, “Predicting Cross-National Levels of Social Trust.”
59 Alesina et al., “Fractionalization.”
60 Haggard and Kaufman, “The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions.”
61 Fairbrother, “Two Multilevel Modeling Techniques,” 119–121.
62 Baltagi, Econometric Analysis; Gelman and Hill, Data Analysis.
63 Hoechle, “Robust Standard Errors.”
64 Norris, Democracy Time-series Dataset, “cosmopolitan index.”
65 Ibid.
66 This variable is based on Norris’s (Democracy Time-series Dataset) housesys variable but is an updated and corrected version. Our housesys variable is 1 when all (or nearly all) members of the lower house are elected by a PR system, 0 if they are elected by majoritarian rule, and 0.5 if there is a mixed (PR plus majoritarian) half-and-half election of members. Countries which have a mixed procedure of election of the lower house members that approximates to a 50–50 distribution are also counted as 0.5 (for example, Georgia has 77 lower house members elected by PR and 73 by majoritarian; Lithuania, 71 to 70; Hungary 152 to 176).
67 Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization.
68 Cf. Norris, Democracy Time-series Dataset.
69 Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins of Political Trust?,” 48; Freitag and Bühlmann, “Crafting Trust,” 1537 and 1554; Van der Meer and Dekker, “Trustworthy States, Trusting Citizens?”; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe,” 210; Van Meer and Hakhverdian, “Institutional Trust, Education, and Corruption,” 89.
70 Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
71 Our results support the recent findings on the institutional sources of political trust. See for example, Godefroidt, Langer, and Meuleman, “Developing Political Trust in a Developing Country”; and Baum, “The Impact of Bureaucratic Openness on Public Trust in South Korea.”
72 Cox and Weingast, “Executive Constraint, Political Stability and Economic Growth.”
73 Henisz, “Political Institutions and Policy Volatility,” 6.
74 Levi and Stoker, “Political Trust and Trustworthiness”; Bouckaert and Van de Walle, “Comparing Measures of Citizen Trust”; Turper and Aarts, “Political Trust and Sophistication”; McLaren, “The Cultural Divide in Europe”; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kursat Cinar
Kursat Cinar earned his PhD in Political Science from Ohio State University. His research interests centre on party politics, democratization, patron-client relationships, development, and gender politics. He has published in Politics & Gender, Political Studies, Democratization, Contemporary Politics, Mediterranean Politics, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, and Turkish Studies. Kursat Cinar’s book titled Departing Democracy: The Rise of Hegemonic Party Rule in Turkey and Beyond will be published by the University of Michigan Press. A chapter written by Cinar on clientelism has recently appeared in the Sage Encyclopedia of Political Behavior. Dr Cinar is Fulbright and EU Marie Curie Alumnus and the recipient of the 2013 Sabancı International Research Award. He is also an Associate Editor of Politics & Gender. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Middle East Technical University’s Department of Political Science & Public Administration.
Meral Ugur-Cinar
Meral Ugur-Cinar received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. She was a Mellon Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at the New School for Social Research in 2012–2013. Her research interests include political institutions, democracy, citizenship, collective memory, social movements, and gender. Her articles have appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, Political Studies, Politics & Gender, Political Quarterly, Middle Eastern Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and Turkish Studies. A chapter she co-authored with Rogers Smith can be found in Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests and Identities (Chicago University Press). Her book titled Collective Memory and National Membership: Identity and Citizenship Models in Turkey and Austria is published by Palgrave. Dr Ugur-Cinar is currently an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.