Type of Trust and Political Participation in Five Countries: Results of Social Quality Survey

Political participation can take shape in many types of participation, between which the overlap is low. However, the similarities and differences between various types of participants are surprisingly understudied. In this article, I propose to differentiate between four types of participants: institutional political participants, non-institutional political participants, civic participants, and political consumers. These types differ from each other on two dimensions: whether they are political or publicly oriented and whether they are formally or informally organized. Building on the matching hypothesis, I argue that we should differentiate those four types of participants by their outlook on society (societal pessimism, political trust, and social trust). Using data from the European Social Survey 2006, including participants from 19 countries, logistic regressions show that institutional political participants trust politics rather than people, non-institutional political participants are societal pessimists who trust other people, civic participants are societal optimists who trust other people, and political consumers are pessimists who do not trust politics.

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Type of Trust and Political Participation in Five Countries: Results of Social Quality Survey

Cited by 5 publications

References 20 publications

Institutional Trust and Political Participation in Africa

Institutional Trust and Political Participation in Africa

Institutional Trust and Political Participation in Africa

One of a Kind, or All of One Kind? Groups of Political Participants and Their Distinctive Outlook on Society

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