Political (dis)trust as determinant of voting and protest forms of citizen participation in politics

Abstract

Starting from a two-dimensional understanding of trust in institutions, we examine the predictability of trust in political institutions and trust in non-political national institutions in explain voting and protest forms of citizen participation in politics, as well as the possible mediating role of satisfaction with the functioning of the political system. The paper is based on the Croatian data of the fifth wave of the European Values ​​Study (EVS, 2018). Individual associations between the two forms of trust and the two types of participation indicate that greater confidence in political institutions is associated with more frequent electoral participation and a lower propensity for protest participation. In contrast, trust in non-political institutions is only associated with less propensity for protest participation. At the same time, both forms of political trust are strongly interconnected and accompanied by greater satisfaction with the functioning of the political system, which is weakly positively associated with voting and negatively associated with a tendency to protest. The multivariate analysis confirmed only the independent positive contribution of trust in political institutions to voting. We discuss the results in the context of the high association between the two forms of political trust in Croatian context, and the findings to date regarding the determinants of voting and protest participation as two forms of citizen participation in politics.