Fair treatment, fair play? The relationship between fair treatment perceptions, political trust and compliant and cooperative attitudes cross‐nationally

Abstract

Obtaining citizens’ voluntary compliance with political decisions is a fundamental democratic challenge. Fair treatment by public officials plays a key role in theoretical and empirical studies on citizens’ compliance and cooperation. Yet it is unclear whether citizens within different societies react to (un)fair treatment in the same way. Using multilevel structural equation modelling and multilevel regression analysis on the European Social Survey 2010–2 (N = 52,458), this article shows that perceptions of fair treatment by police officers are associated with higher levels of trust in political institutions and in turn stronger compliant and cooperative attitudes of citizens in 27 countries. Yet the link between perceptions of unfair treatment and institutional trust is stronger in countries in which fair behaviour is more prevalent. While fair treatment is often considered to be a universal norm affecting citizens in a uniform way, this article sheds light on important cross‐national variations.

When state‐level institutions cannot tell the whole story: An inquiry into municipal variations in quality of government

“…Previous studies have investigated and corroborated that efficient and impartial government institutions matter for social trust, that is, trust among citizens in general (see for example, Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005; Freitag, 2006; Freitag & Bühlmann, 2009; Freitag & Traunmüller, 2009; Rothstein & Stolle, 2008; Kumlin & Rothstein, 2005). Fair and impartial treatment by public institutions implies that citizens are treated alike and that only those considerations that are stipulated by law or regulation are taken into account (Marien & Werner, 2019). In the case of Sweden, citizens are likely to encounter public institutions in the form of local government institutions as these carry out a wide range of welfare state‐tasks and grant permits such as building permits.…”

“…In the case of Sweden, citizens are likely to encounter public institutions in the form of local government institutions as these carry out a wide range of welfare state‐tasks and grant permits such as building permits. Citizens, in general, are therefore hypothesized to infer trustworthiness of others based on the behavior of the civil servants that populate local government institutions (e.g., Marien & Werner, 2019; Newton, Stolle, & Zmerli, 2018; Sønderskov & Dinesen, 2016; Tankard & Paluck, 2016).…”

“…Previous studies have also shown that the norm of fairness of treatment is strong in the Scandinavian countries. Citizens' perceptions of fairness of treatment correlate strongly with levels of corruption at the aggregate level (Marien & Werner, 2019). Studies using panel data show a strong effect from trust in institutions on social trust, thus arguing that perceptions about institutions shape the perceptions about others rather than the other way around (Sønderskov & Dinesen, 2016).…”

Reclaiming the Left

“…19 Inequality is pervasive but also pernicious if allowed to grow. Inequality has been found to fuel resentment (Gegel, Lebedeva & Frolova, 2015); undermine democracy (Gilens & Page, 2014;Marien & Werner, 2018); negatively affect economic growth (Cingano, 2014); and lead to violence and suffering (Beyer, 2016;Brown & Stewart, 2015).…”

The ‘sanction-policy’ linkage from the perspective of citizens and the role of the party system

“…For an overview and the descriptive statistics of the variables seeTable A.1 and Table A.2 and in the Supplementary Material. Following an approach usually adopted in the literature(Marien and Werner 2018), political trust is measured by the latent variable obtained with the factor analysis of three items, namely 'trust in parliament', 'trust in parties', and 'trust in politicians'. Results of the latent variable model are reported inTable A.4 in the Supplementary Material.12 Including a control for winner/loser status is particularly relevant for the analysis.…”