Trust, Mistrust and Fairness of Elections in the Light of Populist Attitudes

The level of trust reported by Germans in surveys is high in a European comparison (7th place out of 20 countries) and over time (2000 to 2018). However, when a distinction is made between the objects in which trust is placed, differences emerge. Germany only ranks 8th out of 20 when it comes to trust in the social system, while it ranks 5th out of 20 when it comes to the economic system (Enste & Suling, 2020). The figures illustrate that people rate how much trust they place in which object very differently. Still, this distinction is not reflected in political science research; studies operationalize political trust either via objects of trust (institutions, actors) or, following Easton (1976), via system support, but derive crisis diagnoses of trust from both. However, studies that measure procedural fairness show the negative consequences of a lack of trust, such as extreme voting behavior or falling voter turnout, but the causes of a lack of trust remain unclear and there is no link to mistrust in procedures that are actually intended to create this fairness, namely elections. But, in times when populist politicians like Trump are celebrating electoral successes, it is essential to find out how procedural fairness is linked to populist attitudes. In doing so, we draw on findings from the field of electoral integrity, which shows that parties or politicians influence voters' distrust in elections and election results (plot hypothesis) and that the outcome of an election can have an effect on distrust in elections if people lean towards the party that lost the election (winner-loser effect). We test the hypotheses with a novel dataset, which makes it possible to test the interplay with different measures of trust and populist attitudes in the aftermath of the federal election in Germany.