The winner takes all the trust: populism, democracy, and winner-loser gaps in political trust in Central and Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

Studies typically find that supporters of populist parties exhibit low political trust. Drawing on research on winner-loser gaps in political support and the consequences of political polarization on attitudes, I re-examine the association between populism and political trust taking into account the supported party’s status in or outside of government, distinguishing between government leaders and junior coalition partners. I analyze data from the European Social Survey Rounds 1–9 from nine Central and Southern European countries that experienced populist parties as government leaders, combined with party characteristics from the Varieties of Party Identity and Organization as well as democracy scores from the Varieties of Democracy datasets. Results show that the effect of party status on political trust is stronger among supporters of populist than non-populist parties. Further, I find that supporters of populist governments enjoy greater trust advantages in less democratic contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Political trust
• populism
• elections
• European Social Survey
• Varieties of Democracy

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Replication materials are available via this anonymous link:

https://osf.io/7j3ua/?view_only=209067bfb9d64417a46af9cc2ac8d647

Replication materials

Replication materials are available via this link: https://osf.io/7j3ua/.

Notes

1. This is the case of Freedom Party of Austria and the Swiss People’s Party.

2. By populism I mean the „thin ideology” or discursive frame, which tends to be combined with a ‘thick ideology’, such as nationalism or socialism (Mudde 2017a, 2017b).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre [2019/32/C/ HS6/00421].