Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.5613/rzs.50.3.3
Political (Dis)Trust as a Determinant of Voting and Protest Participation
Renata Franc
orcid.org/0000-0002-1909-2393
; Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, Croatia
Marina Maglić
orcid.org/0000-0002-6851-4601
; Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, Croatia
Ines Sučić
orcid.org/0000-0002-3533-3660
; Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, Croatia
Abstract
Starting from a two-dimensional understanding of trust in political institutions, the paper examines trust in the government and representative institutions and trust in executive institutions as predictors of voting and protest participation, as well as the possible mediating role of satisfaction with the functioning of the political system. The paper is based on the Croatian data from the fifth wave of the European Values Study (EVS, 2017). Individual associations between the two forms of trust and the two types of participation indicate that greater trust in government and representative institutions is associated with more frequent voting and a lower propensity for protest participation. In contrast, trust in executive institutions is only associated with a lower propensity for protest participation. At the same time, both forms of political trust are strongly interconnected and accompanied with greater satisfaction with the functioning of the political system, which is weakly positively associated with voting and negatively associated with the propensity for protest participation. The multivariate analysis confirmed only the trust in government and representative institutions as a unique positive predictor of voting. The results are discussed in view of the high association between the two forms of political trust in the Croatian context, and the findings to date regarding the determinants of voting and protest participation as two forms of political participation.
Keywords
European Values Study; voting; political participation; trust in institutions; protest participation
Hrčak ID:
249218
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2020.
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