Internal Efficacy and Political Trust: Evidence from a Mature Democracy

• In Event: Public Perceptions of Bureaucratic Programs and Agencies

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that political efficacy correlates positively with political trust. However, an evolving strand in the literature asks if efficacy might diminish trust, since it makes individuals better at evaluating departures from norms of impartiality. To better elucidate the mechanisms underlying this reasoning, we delve deeper into subnational variations in quality of government in a mature democracy: Sweden. We explore whether the paradoxical relationship between political efficacy and political trust is present also here, in a ‘least likely’ context. We analyze individual-level survey data with ca 10,000 respondents nested in 36 different municipalities with varying levels of Quality of Government (QoG) in their local public administrations. Our analyses show that a key variable in understanding why those who perceive to have high levels of external political efficacy also are more likely to have lower levels of political trust is the perception of impartiality. Those who live in municipalities which have local government institutions that are less impartial, in combination with high individual levels of external political efficacy, are more likely to distrust political institutions.

Authors

• Gissur Erlingsson, Lund University

• Susanne Wallman Lundasen, Linköping university