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A scandal effect? Local scandals and political trust

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Abstract

Scandals that hit political institutions and their actors are likely to contribute to lowering political trust. However, few studies examine the accuracy of such relationship at the local level. This article aims to contribute to the field by assessing the impact of local scandals on trust in local government and the mayor in the context of a federal state, Belgium. The research relies on an original dataset that includes a selection of municipalities that were hit by a scandal and of municipalities that were not in the running-up of the 2018 local elections. Our findings suggest the existence of a ‘scandal effect’ on voters’ trust in local government and mayor. First, trust in local institutions appears significantly lower in municipalities that were hit by a scandal. Second, the effect of scandals at the individual level appears to be reinforced by voters’ perception of trustworthiness of local politicians: scandals more significantly affect trust in local government among voters who evaluate negatively local politicians.

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Notes

  1. Municipal level elections are synchronised with provincial elections, which can be considered ‘third-order’ elections.

  2. Since 2018, the Walloon local elections lean towards a fully open-list system (Dodeigne et al. 2020a).

  3. According to the press magazine Le Vif / L’Express, which publicized the scandal in December 2016, the remuneration per hour for these meetings is estimated between 3960 and 30.180 euros.

  4. Each municipality in Belgium has its own CPAS. The body is in charge of social affairs and policies at the local level. The President of the CPAS is a member of the municipal government.

  5. It might be argued that this greater variance for trust in mayors might be partly by additional external political factors associated with the mayoral figure, such as his/her party brand and political ideological. Therefore, we run additional robustness checks control for the mayor’s party brand (see below Sect. 4).

  6. The 2012 Exit Poll Survey was organized in very similar fashion as the 2018 one.

  7. We furthermore run additional robustness checks controlling for the mayor’s party brand. The betta coefficient for our three main covariates of interests (scandal in the municipality, voters’ attitudes vis-à-vis politicians trustworthiness and the interactive effect between the two) are hardly altered while they present highly similar statistical significance levels.

  8. As stated by Brambor et al. (2006), it is possible to observe statistical marginal effects to be different for substantively relevant values of the interactive variable but not for others.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

    Caroline Close

  2. Université de Namur (UNamur), Namur, Belgium

    Jérémy Dodeigne

  3. Universiteit Hasselt (UHasselt), Hasselt, Belgium

    Sofie Hennau

  4. Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Min Reuchamps

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  1. Caroline Close
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  2. Jérémy Dodeigne
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  3. Sofie Hennau
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  4. Min Reuchamps
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Correspondence to Min Reuchamps.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5 and Fig. 3.

Table 4 Local scandals across municipalities
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Table 5 The determinants of trust in federal and regional government—Multilevel linear regression models
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Fig. 3
figure 3

Effect of scandal on trust in the federal (left) and in the regional government (right), according to respondents’ attitudes about politicians’ use of power for their personal interests

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Close, C., Dodeigne, J., Hennau, S. et al. A scandal effect? Local scandals and political trust. Acta Polit 58, 212–236 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-022-00241-y

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