Political distrust amidst the Great Recession: The mitigating effect of welfare state effort

Abstract:

The economic crisis that erupted in Europe in 2008 has not only caused economic grievances, but hurt citizens’ trust in their national political system. By now, most research attributes this loss in political trust to governments’ failing economic achievements.

This article considers if and to what extent the drop in political trust amidst the Great Recession also was connected to governments’ welfare state effort. Combining individual and country-level data in a comparative multilevel research design, this paper overall finds that in cases of sudden and severe performance setbacks for which accountability is hard to assign, trust in democratic institutions may suffer.

However, political trust seems to be especially susceptible to economic performance setbacks in countries with relatively low levels of welfare state effort, suggesting that governments might blunt some of the pain of an economic crisis by providing generous welfare state services to those in need.