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This study provides a new frame of reference for understanding intraparty dynamics by analyzing party members’ representativeness with respect to party supporters regarding socioeconomic status and the ideological spectrum in a multiparty system, namely that of Finland. The analysis is based on a unique member-based survey of Finland’s six major political parties ( N = 12,427), which is combined with supporter data derived from a nationally representative survey ( N = 1648). The clearest difference was found between supporters’ and members’ social status as members were generally in clearly higher social positions. However, there is a wider gap between parties when comparing supporters and members in terms of social status. Findings show that political opinions on income equality are still a key difference between traditional mass parties at the different levels of party strata, while incongruence within parties is relatively low. In contrast to the traditional parties, the newer parties, namely the Finns and the Greens, are ideologically close to their supporters in terms of attitudes concerning immigration and environment. Together, these findings provide an interesting landscape of the last decade’s changes in the Finnish political spectrum and contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing forms of political parties.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the association between political party preference and trust in knowledge-based institutions, while also considering how political trust facilitates the association. The authors focus on the opinions of supporters of the six largest parliamentary political parties in Finland. Design/methodology/approach The data are based on a population level survey. First, the authors compared party supporters’ trust in universities and YLE media. Second, the authors analyzed how political trust contributes to party supporters’ trust in knowledge-based institutions by estimating predicted probabilities. Third, the authors derived the partial correlations from the non-linear probability models incorporated separately between trust in YLE, Universities and political trust, and compared the correlations across the parties. Finally, the authors conducted the logit models from which the authors post-estimated the predicted probabilities of having high trust in YLE and Universities according to the levels of political trust separately for each party. Findings The results showed a cumulation of trust, reflecting especially on the attitudes of the populist party supporters who tended to have lower trust in knowledge-based institutions and distrust was highly associated with low political trust. This cumulation of trust shows an interesting dynamic in how closely institutions are linked together in terms of attitudes on their legitimacy. Originality/value This study assesses the cumulation of distrust, while providing an alternative political spectrum to the US two party system that has been the major focus of past research. Furthermore, the study fills a gap in the research by being the first to assess the intersection of the trust dimensions.