The Impact of Political Factors on Developing Political Trust in Multilevel Political Systems

Although the debate on roots and causes of political trust is ongoing, many scholars agree about the relevance of such political factors as institutional performance, political responsiveness and political/ideological distance between the citizens and governmental incumbents. Still, no study to this day investigated and compared the relevance of those factors across three levels of a multilevel governance system (EU, national and local government). In this paper, we hypothesise (1) that political trust is specific (i.e. depends on characteristics of the political incumbents at a given level of governance) and 2) that the effects of such characteristics becomes stronger the closer the given level of governance is from a citizens’ perspective. We test our hypotheses on data collected through the Dutch Local Election Studies 2018, which were later on complemented with additional questions following the European Parliament elections in May 2019.