Pushing and Pulling: The Static and Dynamic Effects of Political Distrust on Support for Representative Democracy and its Rivals.

Abstract

Distrust is widely argued to stimulate support for political and institutional change. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars whether distrust pulls people towards rivaling decision-making models such as direct democracy, technocracy, and authoritarianism. This paper argues that political distrust is an unconditional push-factor away from the status quo (i.e., representative democracy), but that the appeal of any specific alternative decision-making models among distrusters is conditional on their political dispositions. This paper systematically tests rivaling theories on the micro-level relationship between political distrust and support for change, representative democracy, and alternative decision-making models. Crucially, we test to what extent the pull-factor of rivaling models is conditional on citizens' political efficacy and populist leaning. Moreover, we separate the effects of structurally low trust from that of dynamically declining trust by estimating Random Effects Within Between (REWB) models on three-wave panel survey data across four European countries (the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Portugal). Our findings confirm that distrust unconditionally pushes people away from the status quo, but does not unconditionally pull people towards any alternative model. Rather than technocracy (mixed effects) and authoritarianism (predominantly negative effects), we find that political distrust particularly stimulates support for direct democracy. This positive effect of political distrust on support for direct democracy is particularly strong among efficacious citizens and supporters of populist parties. This aligns with the idea of dissatisfied democrats, whose distrust drives their ambition for more direct influence.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-024-09994-y.