Trust in politics is in long-term decline around the world – new research

Citizens’ trust in their political institutions has been falling around the world. This may not come as a shock to many.

British politics has been in chaos since the Brexit referendum in 2016. Rioters stormed the US Capitol in protest against the result of the 2020 presidential election. And the US president, Donald Trump, is continuing to attack the supposed “deep-state” controlling American politics. None of these things scream public trust in government.

But declining political trust is not self-evident. It’s possible that we may be too focused on a couple of countries that dominate our attention, and a lot has been going on in recent years that could explain the situation that we find ourselves in.

Many researchers have also pointed out that people have never been particularly fond of politics. They suggest that we’ve simply been seeing “trendless fluctuations” in trust – ebbs and flows where we happen to notice declines more than rises or stability.

In a recently published study, my co-authors and I took on this debate. We analysed more data on political trust than previous studies, from over 5 million respondents to 3,377 surveys conducted in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019.

Our models suggest that, at least since 1990, trust in parliament and government has indeed been declining by an average of about 8.4 and 7.3 percentage points respectively in democratic countries across the world.

The same does not apply to trust in non-representative “implementing institutions”, such as the civil service, justice system or police. In fact, we find that trust in the police has increased by about 12.5 percentage points across democracies on average over the same period.

Thus, declining trust in government appears to be rooted in how politics is practised, which is seemingly less inspiring to citizens today, rather than in a growing distaste for social institutions in general.

Of course, this global picture masks a more nuanced story. Political trust has been rising in a few smaller countries: Denmark, Ecuador, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. These nations may chart a path forward for the rest of the democratic world.

Conversely, trust in the legal system has been declining in many countries in eastern Europe and Latin America. The same appears to be the case more recently in the US, suggesting that implementing institutions are not immune to the political trust crisis.

Our findings do not answer why citizens of democracies are gradually losing faith in their democratic institutions, or what the consequences could be. They also do not suggest how trust in politics can be rebuilt. But what we do know is concerning.

For instance, our data tells us that political trust was declining dramatically in Hungary right up until 2010, when Viktor Orbán was re-elected as prime minister (his first term ended in 2002). When in office, Orbán started dismantling the country’s constitutional and liberal democratic order.

We also know that the US has seen one of the more dramatic declines of political trust in recent times, and that political distrust was a powerful predictor of voting for Trump at least in the 2016 Republican primaries.

In a survey conducted that year by American National Election Studies, about 24% of Trump’s primary voters said they would “never” trust the federal government to do what is right. This compared with about 9% of voters for rival Republican candidate John Kasich, and 8% and 4% of voters for Democrat candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton respectively.

We do not yet have data for the 2024 US presidential election. But it does not take a political scientist to know that Trump leaned even more heavily on people’s distrust in government in his campaign. Since becoming president, he has stepped up his efforts to dismantle America’s constitutional and liberal democratic order.

Declining political trust is not the only cause of these developments. We are also seeing illiberal candidates and parties doing increasingly well in countries where we didn’t see the same trust declines in our data. The rising popularity of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany are both good examples.

Some of this may be driven partly by more recent trust declines, like in the Netherlands where trust in parliament has dropped substantially since 2020. Or it could be driven by a polarisation of trust between a more trusting majority and a deeply distrusting minority. But much of it is also probably driven by other factors, such as economic distress, attitudes towards immigration and the “culture wars” of our day.

It stands to reason that voters who deeply distrust the political establishment would tend to be attracted to populist leaders who rail against that establishment.

These voters probably still support democracy as an ideal. Support for democratic principles has, in fact, remained high globally – although there are worrying signs among younger generations in US and UK. But these voters appear to be more willing to vote for politicians who will attack the institutions needed to make it work.

Sceptical mistrust of government

This brings us to one crucial question: are citizens right to distrust government? After all, political institutions haven’t been working all that well for a large portion of citizens – except maybe in areas like Scandinavia, where we have seen rising trust in recent times.

A degree of sceptical mistrust of government is certainly vital for a healthy democracy. We are reminded of this by some of the more sobering points in our data.

China has the highest rates of reported trust in the world, while Hungary and Russia have both seen rising trust levels as their governments have become less democratic and seized control of the media environment. Clearly, trust is not unequivocally good from a democratic perspective.

Our challenge is to find the right balance: a climate of sceptical trust, where we hold our governments to account and engage critically with our institutions without throwing them away in favour of autocratic populists.

To save the foundations of liberal democracy, we may need to rediscover its appeal to the ordinary citizen. If it’s something about the way politics is practised that citizens distrust, perhaps those politics need to change.

Viktor Valgarðsson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.