Political Trust as the Evaluation of Process and Performance: A Cross-National Study of 42 European Countries

This article extends and tests the trust-as-evaluation approach that is dominant in political science. Citizens supposedly grant and withhold trust in politics based on an assessment of its merits. We argue that the relevance of performances and processes should be conditional on the values that citizens hold dear and the accuracy with which they perceive them. Through multilevel analyses of the European Value Survey 2008, we model the (conditional) effects of a wide range of macro-economic outcomes and procedural characteristics on two aspects of political trust: satisfaction with democracy and confidence in political institutions. We find that macro-economic outcomes do not relate to political trust once we control for corruption. The effects of corruption and macro-economic outcomes are indeed stronger among the higher educated. However, the effect of macro-economic outcomes is not conditional on citizens' values. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for the use of the trust-as-evaluation approach.