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Economic inequality, perceived responsiveness and political trust

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Abstract

From a representation theory point of view, trust in political institutions is strongly related to the responsiveness of these institutions to citizens’ preferences. However, is this also true when the political power of citizens is not equal, which is often the case in more unequal societies? In this article, it is argued that the link between perceptions of responsiveness to individual preferences and political trust differs across equal and unequal societies. We find that in inclusive societies, perceived political responsiveness is strongly related to political trust, whereas this link becomes weaker in more unequal societies. In other words, when economic inequality and exclusion are high, traditional accountability mechanisms between political actors and their citizens are less apparent. We speculate that this weaker link is due to habituation or a lack of political engagement, causing citizens to withdraw from political life altogether. The focus of this article lies on European and OECD-member countries. The study uses data from the International Social Survey Programme and the European Social Survey.

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Fig. 1

Note: These plots represent the marginal effect of perceived responsiveness on political trust, when controlling for the effect of the Gini coefficient of income or the net poverty rate. The grey areas represent the confidence bounds (95%), and the distribution of country scores is plotted at the bottom of the figure. All models are estimated with the REML approach and controlled for the described individual and country level variables. Unstandardised data are reported for ease of interpretation. The models are robust for outliers (tested with jackknifing)

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Notes

  1. This line of thinking is analogous to the perspective of authors that investigate the rise of “critical citizens” and “dissatisfied democrats”, with more demanding citizens becoming more critical about their political decision-makers (e.g. Dalton and Welzel 2014 or Norris 2011).

  2. Note that surveys were sometimes fielded in 2 years within one country. Macro-level data are based on the last year of fielding.

  3. Countries participating in the ISSP round of 2004 and 2014 on Citizenship but not analysed are the Dominican Republic, Georgia, India, the Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, South Africa and Venezuela.

  4. This question is similar—though not identical—to one of the political trust questions within the American National Elections Study, which asks respondents the following: "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right-just about always, most of the time or only some of the time?".

  5. Note that the questions are also used to gauge external efficacy. Within the ISSP there are no distinct measurements of both concepts. When efficacy and perceived responsiveness are operationalised separately, the indicators correlate strongly (Esaiasson et al. 2015). This is not surprising, because both perceived responsiveness and external efficacy are operationalisations of the broader concept of political accountability (Weatherford 1992). In the European Social Survey 2012 round, different indicators of responsiveness are included. In this article, we will use questions that lie closer to the ideal operationalisation of perceived responsiveness, as put forward by Powell (2004) or Esaiasson et al. (2015): “how often you think the government in [country] today changes its planned policies in response to what most people think?” and “how often you think the government in [country] today sticks to its planned policies regardless of what most people think?” (more information in Appendix 4).

  6. The correlation (Pearson’s correlation) with political trust was 0.12 for whether respondents thought that they had no influence on what government does and 0.31 for the question on government did not care what people like them thought.

  7. For the replication analyses on the basis of the ESS, we use the at-risk-of-poverty and social exclusion rate of Eurostat, which had a broader coverage of the ESS participant countries. Using the OECD country data for poverty delivered substantially equal results.

  8. Similar problems are encountered when gathering data from other sources, such as the World Bank or Eurostat.

  9. In addition, no information is available for Switzerland in 2005.

  10. A small note on the collection of the data. In some cases, I had to impute data to acquire data for all countries. First, there are only data available until 2015. As the ISSP surveys were only fielded in 2016 in Austria and between 2015 and 2016 in Belgium, the latest available information (of 2015) was imputed.

  11. All CPI scores correspond with the year in which survey was fielded, with 2015 data for Australia and Denmark.

  12. Model 1 is based on the same analyses as Model 5 of Table 5.

  13. Note that this is a recurring problem in social sciences research (Bryan and Jenkins 2016). Other studies (cited in this article) on political trust faced similar issues with a limited N at the second level, including Anderson and Singer (2008) (20 countries); Hakhverdian and Mayne (2012) (21 countries) or Zmerli and Castillo (2015) (18 countries).

  14. No questions on voting behaviour during the last general election were asked in the 2004 round.

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  1. KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, B3602, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Silke Goubin

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Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 7.

Table 7 Overview of dependent and independent variables—individual level
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Appendix 2

See Tables 8, 9.

Table 8 Overview of country level indicators 2004 round
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Table 9 Overview of country level indicators 2014 round
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Appendix 3

See Table 10.

Table 10 Perceived responsiveness and political trust for separate responsiveness indicators
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Appendix 4: Replication of analyses with the 2012 European Social Survey

See Tables 11, 12 and Fig. 2.

Table 11 Overview of individual and country level variables
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Table 12 Replication of analyses with European social survey data
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Fig. 2
figure 2

Note: These plots represent the marginal effect of perceived responsiveness on political trust, when controlling for the effect of the Gini coefficient of income or the at-risk-of poverty and social exclusion rate. The grey areas represent the confidence bounds (95%), the distribution of country scores is plotted at the bottom of the figure. All models are estimated with the REML approach and controlled for the described individual and country level variables. Unstandardised data are reported for ease of interpretation. The models are robust for outliers (tested with jackknifing). Data: European Social Survey. These figures are replications of Fig. 1

Marginal Effects of Perceived Responsiveness on Political Trust.

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Appendix 5

See Table 13.

Table 13 Robustness test with incumbency support (for ISSP round 2014)
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Goubin, S. Economic inequality, perceived responsiveness and political trust. Acta Polit 55, 267–304 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0115-z

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