2023/09/18 by Andrew Dawson, Isabel Krakoff · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Social Capital and Networks #Social Media and Politics
paper · doi:10.1080/13510347.2023.2257607
openalex publication_date 2023/09/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/16
This article empirically assesses competing perspectives of the relationship between democracy and political trust. We conduct multilevel analyses on a cross-national panel dataset of 82 countries for the period 1990–2020. The findings suggest that there is a strong, negative relationship between democracy and political trust that cannot easily be dismissed as an artifact of model misspecification or response bias. Moreover, we re-examine the critical citizens thesis by disaggregating political trust into trust in partisan and “non-partisan” institutions to test the claim that well-functioning democracies contain and channel distrust into the more partisan political institutions to keep distrust from generalizing to the entire political system. The results fail to find a statistically significant difference of the effect of democracy on trust between partisan and non-partisan institutions, suggesting that low political trust within democracies may be a more acute problem than much of the literature suggests.