Institutional performance, political trust, and the moderating role of political allegiances and political sophistication (w/ Sebastian A. Popa)
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Abstract: While the relationship between the objective performance of political systems and citizens’ political trust belongs to one of the most analyzed phenomena in research on political support, we still lack a clear understanding of the cognitive and affective foundations of this relationship. In this paper, we argue that the impact of objective institutional performance on political trust should be stronger for citizens with higher levels of political sophistication, as they have a more elaborated set of skills and knowledge regarding the political world and thus should be better able to assess and evaluate the performance of the political system – both positively and negatively. We test this general argument concerning a moderating role of political sophistication for the relationship between objective institutional performance and political trust using comparative survey data from the European Election Studies (EES) 2014 and the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002-2018. In doing so, our empirical assessment not only provides valuable insights into the underlying nature of the relationship between institutional performance and political trust, but also offers much needed empirical evidence on the question of whether feelings of disenchantment and distrust are grounded in more rational and cognitive considerations of the politically sophisticated or rather establish a more affective attribute of the less politically sophisticated citizenry.