Top

Social Indicators Research

Published in:

06-12-2023 | Original Research

Who Cares? Issue Salience as a Key Explanation for Heterogeneity in Citizens’ Approaches to Political Trust

Author: Lisanne de Blok

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 2/2024

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

Political trust is a critical facet of the democratic legitimacy of political institutions. A vast body of research convincingly demonstrates that political trust is responsive to actual political performance, where citizens trust their government if it performs well and vice versa. However, if political trust is based on citizens’ evaluations of government performance, this raises the question what type of performance citizens take into consideration. This research note demonstrates that citizens’ bases of political trust vary as they emphasize different policy issues, and that perceived issue salience can explain this variation. Using a combination of longitudinal cross-sectional data from EU member states and novel multi-level Dutch data, it models both collective and personal issue salience as key conditions for performance-based political trust. In doing so, this research note generates new insights into the formation of political trust.

previous article Ingroup Trust, Outgroup Trust, and Internet Use During Situational Crises: Evidence from Chinese Panel Data, 2016–2020

next article Wellbeing Rankings

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Available only for authorised users

35.75% of the respondents filled in the survey after the start of the war. I control for potential effects of the Ukraine war in the models.

The following waves of the Eurobarometer are included: EB 65.4, EB 69.2, EB 73.4, EB 77.3, EB 81.4, EB 85.2, and EB 89.1.

The following countries are included: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and Slovenia.

For more information on the sampling procedures, please see the website of the ESS and the website of the EB.

Centerdata, a leading private research institute specialized in survey and market research, collected the data using computer-assisted self-interviewing. Their Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences (LISS) panel is based on a high quality randomly-selected probability sample of all Dutch households drawn from the population register by Statistics Netherlands. For more information on the survey, see de Blok and Brummel (2022).

See https://www.centerdata.nl/en/liss-panel for more information on the LISS panel.

Cronbach’s alpha is above 0.88 across all waves.

Cronbach’s alpha 0.96.

The question used the term ‘de nationale overheid’ for which there is no English equivalent. It refers to the highest authority within a sovereign area, which in the Dutch case consists of the parliament, the government, the senate, the heads of state (king and queen) and the public administration. It can therefore be interpreted as a measure of diffuse support.

As a robustness check, the analyses were also run with respondents who answered ‘don’t know’. This resulted in similar effects, both in size, direction and significance.

The analyses were run with and without respondents who answered ‘don’t know’; both yielded similar results in terms of direction, size, and significance. The number of ‘don’t knows’ per issue for the evaluation question: education (7.2%), health care (3.5%), the economy (5.4%), social security (7.3%), safety (3.8%), immigration (11.4%), youth care (20.7%), and the climate (6%). Of the entire sample, 2.6% answered ‘don’t know’ on all eight issues.

Moreover, to understand the meaning of this measurement, additional analyses predicted issue satisfaction using an individuals’ prioritization of an issue. Interestingly, while the prioritization of an issue often coincides with a negative evaluation of that issue, the size of the effect of issue prioritization on issue satisfaction varies between issues, with prioritization having no significant effect on one’s satisfaction with health care, the issue that is most commonly seen as most important (see “Appendix 2”). This suggests that an important issue is not always the same as an important problem.

The Ukraine-war led to an increase in respondents indicating that ‘safety’ was the most important issue, from 10.7% before February 24 to 19.1% after (Chi-square = 24.0 \(p<0.001\)).

Mean evaluation of other policy areas were: health care 6.05, economy 5.68, climate 4.85, safety 6.0, education 5.9, social security 5.88. These evaluations were captured on a 11-point scale ranging from 0 to 10.

See “Appendix 4” for variable descriptives.

Anderson, C. J. (2007). The end of economic voting? Contingency dilemmas and the limits of democratic accountability. Annual Review of Political Science, 10, 271–296.CrossRef

Bartels, B. (2008). Beyond “fixed versus random effects’’: A framework for improving substantive and statistical analysis of panel, time-series cross-sectional, and multilevel data. The Society for Political Methodology, 9, 1–43.

Behr, R. L., & Iyengar, S. (1985). Television news, real-world cues, and changes in the public agenda. Public Opinion Quarterly, 49(1), 38–57.CrossRef

Bélanger, É., & Meguid, B. M. (2008). Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice. Electoral Studies, 27(3), 477–491.CrossRef

Bell, A., & Jones, K. (2015). Explaining fixed effects: Random effects modeling of time-series cross-sectional and panel data. Political Science Research and Methods, 3(1), 133–153.CrossRef

Boninger, D. S., Krosnick, J. A., & Berent, M. K. (1995). Origins of attitude importance: Self-interest, social identification, and value relevance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(1), 61.CrossRefPubMed

Bovens, M., & Wille, A. (2008). Deciphering the Dutch drop: Ten explanations for decreasing political trust in the Netherlands. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 74(2), 283–305.CrossRef

Chanley, V. A., Rudolph, T. J., & Rahn, W. M. (2000). The origins and consequences of public trust in government: A time series analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly, 64(3), 239–256.CrossRefPubMed

Citrin, J., & Stoker, L. (2018). Political trust in a cynical age. Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 49–70.CrossRef

de Blok, L., & Brummel, L. (2022). Gefundeerd politiek vertrouwen? onderzoek naar de relatie tussen overheidsprestaties en het vertrouwen in politieke instituties. Technical report, Utrecht School of Governance.

de Blok, L., van der Meer, T., & Van der Brug, W. (2020). Policy area satisfaction, perceptions of responsibility, and political trust: A novel application of the REWB model to testing evaluation-based political trust. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 32, 1–22.

De Vries, C. E., & Giger, N. (2014). Holding governments accountable? Individual heterogeneity in performance voting. European Journal of Political Research, 53(2), 345–362.CrossRef

Druckman, J. N. (2004). Priming the vote: Campaign effects in a us senate election. Political Psychology, 25(4), 577–594.CrossRef

Edwards III, G. C., Mitchell, W., & Welch, R. (1995) Explaining presidential approval: The significance of issue salience. American Journal of Political Science, 108–134.

Fournier, P., Blais, A., Nadeau, R., Gidengil, E., & Nevitte, N. (2003). Issue importance and performance voting. Political Behavior, 25(1), 51–67.CrossRef

Hans-Bernd, B., & Mathias Hans, K. (1995). Killer and victim issues: Issue competition in the agenda-setting process of German television. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 7(3), 211–231.CrossRef

Hardin, R. (1999) Do we want trust in government. In Democracy and trust (pp. 22–41). Cambridge.

Haugsgjerd, A., & Kumlin, S. (2020). Downbound spiral? Economic grievances, perceived social protection and political distrust. West European Politics, 43(4), 969–990.CrossRef

Hetherington, M. J., & Rudolph, T. J. (2008). Priming, performance, and the dynamics of political trust. The Journal of Politics, 70(2), 498–512.CrossRef

Huseby, B. (2004) Government Performance and Political Support: A Study of How Evaluations of Economic Performance, Social Policy and Environmental Protection Influence the Popular Assessments of the Political System. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Technology.

Iyengar, S., & Kinder, D. R. (2010). News that matters: Television and American opinion. University of Chicago Press.CrossRef

Kestilä-Kekkonen, E., & Söderlund, P. (2016). Political trust, individual-level characteristics and institutional performance: Evidence from Finland, 2004–13. Scandinavian Political Studies, 39(2), 138–160.CrossRef

Krosnick, J. A., Visser, P., & Harder, J. (2005). The psychological underpinnings of political behavior. In S. T. Fiske & D. T. Gilbert (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 1288–1342). Wiley.

Langer, G. (2001) Trust in government... to do what? Public Perspective 7–10.

Lavine, H., Sullivan, J. L., Borgida, E., & Thomsen, C. J. (1996). The relationship of national and personal issue salience to attitude accessibility on foreign and domestic policy issues. Political Psychology, 17(2), 293–316.CrossRef

Luskin, R. C. (1990). Explaining political sophistication. Political Behavior, 12(4), 331–361.CrossRef

Magalhães, P. C. (2014). Government effectiveness and support for democracy. European Journal of Political Research, 53(1), 77–97.CrossRef

Miller, J. M., Krosnick, J. A., & Fabrigar, L. R. (2016). The origins of policy issue salience: Personal and national importance impact on behavioral, cognitive, and emotional issue engagement. In J. M. Miller (Ed.), Political psychology: New explorations (p. 125). Taylor and Francis.

Miller, A., & Listhaug, O. (1999). Political performance and institutional trust. In P. Norris (Ed.), Critical citizens: Global support for democratic government (pp. 204–216). Oxford University Press.CrossRef

Mishler, W., & Rose, R. (2001). What are the origins of political trust? Testing institutional and cultural theories in post-communist societies. Comparative Political Studies, 34(1), 30–62.CrossRef

Moniz, P., & Wlezien, C. (2020) Issue salience and political decisions. In Oxford research encyclopedia of politics.

Norris, P. (2022). In praise of skepticism: Trust but verify. Oxford University Press.CrossRef

Ouattara, E., Steenvoorden, E., & van der Meer, T. (2023). Political trust as an evaluation against normative benchmarks? A two-wave survey experiment on the role of normative benchmarks in the evaluative model of political trust. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 35(2), 1–13.CrossRef

Pituch, K. A., & Stevens, J. P. (2015). Applied multivariate statistics for the social sciences: Analyses with SAS and IBM’s SPSS. Routledge.CrossRef

Sears, D. O., Lau, R. R., Tyler, T. R., & Allen, H. M. (1980). Self-interest vs. symbolic politics in policy attitudes and presidential voting. American Political Science Review, 74(03), 670–684.CrossRef

Seyd, B. (2015). How do citizens evaluate public officials? The role of performance and expectations on political trust. Political Studies, 63, 73–90.CrossRef

Singer, M. M. (2011). Who says “It’s the economy’’? Cross-national and cross-individual variation in the salience of economic performance. Comparative Political Studies, 44(3), 284–312.CrossRef

Torcal, M. (2014). The decline of political trust in Spain and Portugal: Economic performance or political responsiveness? American Behavioral Scientist, 58(12), 1542–1567.CrossRef

van der Meer, T. W. G. (2017). Economic performance and political trust. In E. M. Uslaner (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of social and political trust (pp. 599–616). Oxford University Press.

van der Meer, T. W. G., & Dekker, P. (2011). Trustworthy states, trusting citizens? A study into objective and subjective determinants of political trust. In S. Zmerli & M. Hooghe (Eds.), Political trust: Why context matters. Causes and consequences of a relational concept (pp. 95–116). ECPR Press.

van der Meer, T. W. G., & Zmerli, S. (2017). The deeply rooted concern with political trust. In S. Zmerli & T. W. G. van der Meer (Eds.), Handbook on political trust (pp. 270–284). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Verba, S., & Almond, G. (1963). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton University Press.

Wlezien, C. (2005). On the salience of political issues: The problem with ‘most important problem’. Electoral Studies, 24(4), 555–579.CrossRef

Yang, K., & Holzer, M. (2006). The performance-trust link: Implications for performance measurement. Public Administration Review, 66(1), 114–126.CrossRef

Title: Who Cares? Issue Salience as a Key Explanation for Heterogeneity in Citizens’ Approaches to Political Trust
Author: Lisanne de Blok
Publication date: 06-12-2023
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Social Indicators Research / Issue 2/2024
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03256-w

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Other articles of this Issue 2/2024

Ranking of Global Smart Cities Using Dynamic Factor Analysis

A New Framework for Evaluating Social Transparency Factors and Personal Brands in Social Networks

Who is more generous over a life cycle? Evidence from China

The Dynamic Relationship Between Multidimensional Energy Poverty and Social Wellbeing’s

Ingroup Trust, Outgroup Trust, and Internet Use During Situational Crises: Evidence from Chinese Panel Data, 2016–2020

The Political Effects of Economic Inequality: Evidence from Hong Kong

Premium Partner