When and why do citizens distrust politicians? The role of the representative function

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Zittel
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 501998210

We currently witness pronounced distrust towards politics across many established democracies. This does not only concern the institutional but also the individual level of analysis. Significant shares of citizens are found to be distrustful towards individual politicians. This poses challenges to liberal democracy since individual politicians are key mechanisms in linking citizens and the state and thus facilitate trust in the political system. Yet, our knowledge about when and why citizens trust individual politicians remains limited. The proposed project contributes to this end by studying the extent to which citizens trust politicians and the causes for variance.We advance these goals in conceptual and empirical ways. To make conceptual headway, we stress the role of representation as a source of individual level trust. We distinguish and aim to study four dimensions in this regard. We first explore citizen’s feelings of being represented and analyze how it affects political trust. We second focus on descriptive representation and how the social traits of representatives both affect the feeling of being represented and political trust. We third stress substantive representation, i.e. how the behaviors of representatives affect citizens’ feelings of being represented and their trust in politicians. The core and fourth contribution of the project is the exploration of the interplay between the descriptive and substantive dimensions of representation and citizens' feeling of being represented and their levels of trust. We argue that the mere presence of descriptive representatives might have a positive effect on citizens' beliefs. But the failure of representatives to represent group interests in substantive ways will attenuate citizens' feelings of being represented and their levels of trust. We consider this interaction a two-way-street, where descriptive and substantial representation mutually reenforce each other. Thus, we postulate that people feel represented and develop trust towards individual politicians as a consequence of who these politicians are and what they do. To study which factors impact the feeling of being represented, we apply a large-N survey-based approach. In this, we aim to go beyond the scarce evidence emanating from the few questions about trust in politicians that we traditionally find in larger survey programs. We combine this with a small-N comparative approach involving Germany, Switzerland and the UK. With this, we introduce variance with regard to theinstitutional context. Lastly, we use experimental approaches to improve causal inference. We conduct survey experiments with citizens that tap into the question how their feeling of being represented and their levels of trust react to different configurations of descriptive and substantive representation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Stefanie Bailer