A Crisis of Political Trust? Global Trends in Institutional Trust from 1958 to 2019 | British Journal of Political Science

Abstract

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.

Excerpts

Our Bayesian models and Stimson’s algorithm suggest a non-linear but clear global trend of declining trust in parliament and government globally – coinciding with a more linear increase in trust in the police and, more modestly, the civil service. More specifically, our MLMs suggest that among democratic countries of the world, there has been an underlying trend of declining trust in parliament by about 9 percentage points in the period from 1990 until 2019, but a rise in trust in the police by about 13 points in the same period. Our Bayesian estimates by individual countries suggest that trust in parliament has been declining in about thirty-six democracies around the world, including large and geo-politically important countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, South Korea, Spain, and the US (Canada and the UK are borderline, but show clearer trends of declining trust in government) – but rising in only six. In addition to this, several countries in Latin America have seen levels of trust collapse since 2010, following increasing levels in the preceding years. These trends are generally clearest in Eastern and Southern Europe but unclear – or clearly absent – in most of Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. These findings thus highlight the importance of being mindful of non-linear trends and regional differences when analysing trends in political support.