Contextual Cognitive Mobilisation: how the Unemployment Rate moderates the impact of Age on Trust in the European Parliament

Does the unemployment rate moderate the impact of age on trust in the European Parliament? The cognitive mobilisation hypothesis by Inglehart (1970) holds that younger individuals trust the European Parliament more. However, previous studies argue that macro socio-economic conditions such as the Unemployment Rate can negatively affect trust towards the EP. Given cross-national variation in UR, the cognitive mobilisation hypothesis may not hold uniformly across the EU. To address the focal question, we integrate research on cognitive mobilisation and the political impact of unemployment. We posit that younger citizens trust the EP more than older citizens, but that this effect is moderated by UR. As suggested by Rosenstone (1982) and Marx and Nguyen (2016), higher levels of UR depress political engagement. Applying this framework to the cognitive socialisation hypothesis, younger citizens in countries where UR is higher may trust the EP less, as they have less resources to keep up with the EP politics. Therefore, we posit that the impact of age on EP trust will be lower in countries with higher UR. To test these hypotheses, we rely on data from the European Social Survey after the Great Recession (2008-2018, Rounds 4-9), for respondents aged between 18 and 65. We fit to this data linear regressions with socio-demographic controls, country-year Fixed Effects, country cluster-robust Standard Errors, and design weights. We find that trust in the EP is higher among younger citizens, with an effect size of around -7% SD. However, the unemployment rate matters: where the country UR is in the bottom quartile, the negative impact of older age on EP trust strengthens to -9% SD, whereas it is -2% SD in the top quartile. Thus, the cognitive mobilisation hypothesis is broadly supported, but the extent of its effect size is powerfully moderated by the national unemployment rate.