Abstract
This article studies how citizens’ evaluations of the political system and its actors affect their propensity to vote. Based on the earlier theoretical and empirical research, we analyse the concepts of political trust and satisfaction that are often used in survey research. We argue that political trust has to do with the normative expectations towards political institutions and actors, whereas satisfaction may be regarded as an indicator of attitudes to policy outputs. Furthermore, we differentiate between attitudes to democratic system on the one hand and political actors on the other hand, because in representative democracies it should be possible to replace incumbent politicians at elections. We hypothesize that trust in parliament and satisfaction with democracy increase turnout, whereas trust in politicians has a smaller impact on turnout, and satisfaction with the incumbent government does not affect turnout at all. The empirical evidence is based on the first round of the European Social Survey, which was collected simultaneously in 22 countries in 2002–2003. Our analysis confirms that trust in parliament has a positive impact on turnout, and also satisfaction with democracy increases it. These effects are especially high when aggregated at a country level and when hard data on turnout are used. At the individual level, in particular trust in parliament increases the likelihood of voting.
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Notes
Gambetta (2000) defines trust as the agent's A subjective probability that the other agent's B actions will not be detrimental to A.
This definition of trust resembles Easton's (1965) conception of diffuse support. Easton argues that legitimacy can be regarded as a quality ascribed to the basic norms and the principles of regime. According to Easton, the sentiments of legitimacy increase the flow of diffuse support for the government. Diffuse support refers to citizens’ support for the elements of the political system itself, whereas specific support refers to citizens’ satisfaction with policy outputs.
The European average was not calculated as a mean of the aggregated trust figures at a country level. Instead, the sample data were weighted so that they are representatives for the whole area according to the countries’ population size. The average trust should therefore correspond to a genuine ‘European’ opinion.
The abbreviations of the countries follow the ISO two-letter standard. The abbreviations can also be deciphered with the help of Table 1 in the present article.
It has also been established that people's personal experience with the public service of the welfare state is associated with their trust in politicians and their satisfaction with how democracy works (Kumlin, 2002, 155–161).
In the ESS questionnaire, the questions of trust were listed one after another possibly causing a strong collinearity in the respondents’ minds.
A detailed description of the sampling principles and interview methods can be found at the ESS website.
In old democracies with compulsory voting, turnout is about 14% points higher than in old democracies where voting is fully optional (Norris, 2004).
The exact questions were as follows. Trust: ‘Using this card, please tell me on a score of 0–10 how much you personally trust each of the institutions I read out. 0 means you do not trust an institution at all, and 10 means you have complete trust’ [Country]'s parliament… Politicians. Satisfaction: (1) ‘Now thinking about the [country] government [the people governing, the present regime], how satisfied are you with the way it is doing its job? Please answer using this card, where 0 means extremely dissatisfied and 10 means extremely satisfied’ (2) ‘And on the whole, how satisfied are you with the way democracy [the democratic system “in practice” is meant, as opposed to how democracy “ought” to work.] works in [country]? Still use this card’.
The options to answer were a scale: ‘Hardly any politicians care what people like me think, very few care, some care, many care, most politicians care what people like me think’. The scale was recoded into a scale from 0 to 1, in accordance with the other item scales.
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Grönlund, K., Setälä, M. Political Trust, Satisfaction and Voter Turnout. Comp Eur Polit 5, 400–422 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110113
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110113