The micro–macro interactive approach to political trust: Quality of representation and substantive representation across Europe

Abstract

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.

An incongruous intervention: Exploring the role of anti‐institutionalism in less‐educated individual’s limited uptake of nutrition information

“…Such institutions "are infused with the implicit but distinctive assumptions, values and taken-for-granted knowledge of the middle class" (Ridgeway, 2014: 11), which especially breeds stigmatizing tendencies towards less-educated individuals and subsequently their anti-institutionalism (cf. Noordzij et al, 2021aNoordzij et al, , 2021cVisser et al, 2021).…”

“…First, a sizable body of literature demonstrates that less‐educated individuals are less trusting of the institutions active in providing nutrition information, i.e. politics (Noordzij et al, 2021c ), science (Achterberg et al, 2017 ) and health care (Laveist et al, 2009 ), with this lower institutional trust connected to unhealthier behaviour (Ahnquist et al, 2008 ) and lower self‐rated health (Mohseni & Lindström, 2008 ). While the relationship between distrust and suboptimal health outcomes has not been tested causally, its existence could indicate a disregard of the institutions’ health promotion efforts, including, but not limited to, nutrition information, among those who distrust institutions more (e.g.…”

A revolt of the deplored? The role of perceived cultural distance in the educational gradient in anti‐establishment politics

“…Focusing on the Netherlands, which has an exceptionally large educational gradient in anti-establishment politics (Noordzij et al, 2019(Noordzij et al, , 2021b, we developed a multi-item scale for perceived cultural distance to politicians based on insights from previous in-depth qualitative work (Noordzij et al, 2021a). Using data collected from a high-quality panel representative of the Dutch population, we found that citizens who perceive politicians to be culturally distant are more likely to display political distrust and populist attitudes, vote for a left-or right-wing populist party instead of a non-populist one, or not vote at all.…”

“…In terms of control variables, we included variables used in studies on political attitudes and behavior (see, e.g., Akkerman et al, 2017;Gidron & Hall, 2017;Jackson, 1995;Noordzij et al, 2019Noordzij et al, , 2021bSpruyt et al, 2016). In particular, we asked whether the respondent (1) is or (0) is not female and for their age in years.…”

Mediating effect of Indonesia’s public trust on national security from the sense of safety, knowledge, and willingness to participate in state defense efforts

“…One of the topics that have always been studied in political science is related to political trust (See e.g Hetherington, 1998;Hetherington and Husser, 2012;Marien and Hooghe, 2011;Noordzij, De Koster and Van Der Waal, 2021;Rudolph and Evans, 2005). Political trust is considered essential to achieve for a good system to be run and for increasing political participation.…”