Rural resentment and political trust in local and national institutions

In recent years, a number of studies have diagnosed a growing resentment of rural residents towards political elites. Ruralites seem to increasingly lose trust in the way the political system works, culminating in a feeling of being ‘left behind’ by the political establishment. However, in most democracies around the world, citizens have to deal with political institutions located at several different levels of government. In this regard, it has been well documented that political institutions at lower tiers elicit higher levels of political trust than institutions on the upper tiers of a country’s political system. Drawing on this observation, this paper argues that the ‘crisis of trust’ in rural areas is not to be understood as a loss of trust in the political system per se, but rather as an increase in skepticism directed at national level institutions specifically. Using original survey data from Germany, multilevel regression models show that increasing levels of rural resentment are strongly correlated with lower trust in the national parliament, but higher trust in political institutions at the local level. This result carries important implications for fostering political trust in ‘left behind’ rural communities. Besides place-sensitive economic policies, continuing to devolve political authority to local institutions might present a viable solution to counteract widespread feelings of rural neglect.