Perceived Autonomy and Political Trust Across Europe: Multi-level Evidence

• In Event: Political Trust and Tolerance

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that individual-level and country-level characteristics are related to political trust. Nevertheless, most of these studies have two limitations. First, socio-demographic (i.e., gender, age, education, income, religiosity), and not the psychological characteristics of people have been investigated. Second, the interaction between individual- and country-level characteristics has not been examined yet.
Research presented here was aimed to fill this gap. We investigate the relationship between autonomy and political trust in countries with different level of political development. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), autonomy refers to the experience of acting as fitting with interests and integrated values that one is wholeheartedly behind. Whereas political trust is defined as trust in the political institutions operating in the country.
Building upon SDT, we proposed that, in general, the relationship between autonomy and political trust would be positive. However, we expected the severity of this pattern to vary in countries with different political regimes. In particular, perceived autonomy in autonomy-supportive environments (i.e., more democratic countries) would be positively related to political trust, whereas perceived autonomy in controlled environments (i.e., non-democratic countries) would be negatively related to trust in political institutions.
To test these hypotheses, we applied multi-level regression modelling on data from two last waves of European Values Study (EVS) to provide the following empirical support. The sample consisted of 64680 and 55276 individuals in EVS 2008 and 2017, respectively. Respondents’ age ranged from 15 to 108 (M = 47.03, SD = 7.79) and females comprised 55.8% of the sample in EVS 2008. As for EVS 2017, participants’ age ranged from 18 to 82 years old (M = 49.53, SD = 17.68), and women comprised 55.2% of the sample.
Autonomy was measured using the following question, "Some people feel they have completely free choice and control over their lives, and other people feel that what they do has no real effect on what happens to them. Please, use the scale to indicate how much freedom of choice and control you feel you have over the way your life goes?" The scale that was used is a 10-point scale from 1 (no freedom) to 10 (a great deal).
Political Trust was measured using the following question, "Look at this card and tell me, for each item listed, how much confidence you have in them, is it a great deal, quite a lot, not very much or none at all?" The institutions that were used in the study are parliament, political parties, the police, and the justice system. Four response options were inverted so that a higher number indicated greater confidence. Thus, the final scale used in the analysis was from 1 (none at all) to 4 (a great deal).
The individual-level independent variable (i.e., autonomy), control variables (i.e., gender, age, educational level, religiosity, interest in politics, political orientations), and dependent variable (i.e., political trust) were drawn from the dataset. The level of democracy was taken from the external data sources (i.e., Freedom House index and Voice and Accountability from Worldwide Governance Indicators). All participants residing in the country were assigned the value of the country they belong to for the analysis.
Results of multi-level regression modelling with fixed slopes revealed that autonomy, indeed, positively predicted higher political trust. At the same time, as expected, the results demonstrated that perceived autonomy positively predicted political trust in autonomy-supportive countries (i.e., high democracy levels), while in countries with controlled institutions (i.e., low democracy levels) the trend tended to be the opposite.
We argue that residents of autonomy-supportive countries with high level of perceived autonomy can achieve their goals through political institutions believe that these institutions should serve their interests and believe that they can influence their activities. At the same time, residents of autonomy-unsupportive countries with high level of perceived autonomy may be able to recognize a mismatch between one’s external situation and internal preferences, which is evident in low level of political trust.

Authors

• Vladislav Krivoshchekov, University of Bern

• Olga Gulevich, Higher School of Economics