Abstract
Individuals with more favorable evaluations of government performance exhibit higher trust in the political system. People also tend to put more confidence in political institutions led by the party they support or identify with. This paper examines the relative importance of these two factors—performance evaluation and electoral winner status—on political trust in the context of strong, and increasing, partisan polarization. Based on the motivated reasoning thesis, we hypothesize that the winner effect and performance evaluations are intertwined, and voters’ evaluations of government performance are filtered through ‘party-tinted glasses.’ Our analysis relies on two waves of the Polish Panel Survey carried out in 2013 and 2018, i.e., before and after the 2015 parliamentary election, which brought a clear shift in power. Results of fixed-effects models show that electoral winner status has a substantial effect on trust in parliament both directly and indirectly, via performance evaluations. We further find that winner status moderates the effect of evaluations of economic performance on trust in parliament: trust among winners is less dependent on evaluations of the economy than among losers and non-voters. We interpret these findings in the context of high and increasing polarization in Poland.
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Data source: European Social Survey, Rounds 1–9
source: European Social Survey, Rounds 1–9
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Notes
Other aspects of representation have also been examined e.g. by Dunn (2015).
Questions about feelings toward political parties are included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, but the data for Poland’s 2015 elections are not publicly available at the time of writing of this paper.
We examined panel attrition and found no evidence of selection on the key variables important in our analysis (see the Online Supplement, Appendix 4).
The winners’ bonus in political trust arguably stems from the fact of supporting the party or parties in power, rather than the party or parties that received the greatest number of votes if they did not end up as part of the cabinet. In the latter case, using the share of votes obtained by each party or on the share of seats in the legislature would be a more appropriate basis for constructing indicators of winner status. Following Poland’s elections of 2011 and 2015, cabinets were formed by the party that won the majority of the votes and parliamentary seats (in 2011 PSL joined PO as a junior coalition partner), we are not able to distinguish the effect of supporting the winning party understood as the one forming the government, and the winning party as the one that received the most votes.
The increase in performance evaluations can be traced to two facts. First involves general trends—while in 2013 economies in Central and Eastern Europe were still recovering after the eurozone crisis (GDP was still relatively flat at the time), they were already booming in 2018. The second involves welfare programs introduced by the PiS government that became widely popular (Gromadzki et al. 2022). Paradoxically then, during the period of democratic backsliding, the national average of political trust has peaked.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Bogdan W. Mach, Leonie Schnieders, and Antonia Höchst, for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
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Grant from the Polish National Science Centre (2019/32/C/HS6/00421).
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Kołczyńska, M., Sadowski, I. Seeing the world through party-tinted glasses: performance evaluations and winner status in shaping political trust under high polarization. Acta Polit 58, 380–400 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-022-00249-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-022-00249-4