No abstract

Much of the educational gradient in trust in politicians remains unexplained by prevailing theories on material resources and institutional knowledge. Our novel explanation theorizes that: in its relationship with trust in politicians, education is a status indicator; and the lower trust in politicians among the less educated reflects the latter's opposition to the former's status signaling. Analyses of representative Dutch survey data (n = 1,296) demonstrate that indicators of affinity with elite culture do indeed largely underlie the association between the level of education and trust in politicians. We discuss the relevance of our findings for debates on "culture wars."

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri butio n-NonCo mmerc ial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

The relevance of the macro-context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro-macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more-educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro-macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual-level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro-level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual-level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro-context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country-year combinations), enriched with country-level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi-level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro-macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more-educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.

In this article, we explore how people differ in interpreting members of their own and other social classes as portrayed in reality television. Using in-depth interviews, participants from three social classes watched video fragments showing people belonging to four social classes. The results indicate that we can distinguish four specific ways of interpreting, namely tolerance, distancing, practical, and identifying. These ways of interpreting are characteristic for the social classes of the viewers and differ in the extent in which they build on identity, distancing, openness, and stereotyping. The differences point towards an important but ambiguous role played by openness within the cultural elite, a strong class-consciousness shown by the economic elite, and a general importance of cultural and economic capital.