Fit and Misfit in the Trust Relationship: How Political Elites’ and Citizens’ Respective Perceptions of the Good Citizens and the Good Leaders Affect Political Trust. The Case of France.

In the context of democratic deconsolidation, political trust has been at the core of a growing literature these last fifteen years. While the definitions of trust are still object of fiercely debates (PytlikZillig & Kimbrough 2016), there is a common agreement on the relational dimension of trust (Van der Meer & Zmerli 2017). Yet, most of the literature focus on citizen’s trust in political elites (Carstens 2023; Devine et al. 2024; Hooghes et al. 2017; Pilet et al. 2020; Winsvold et al. 2024). Only a few works scrutinize political elites’ positions and perceptions (Petit 2020; Walgrave et al. 2023), and even fewer studies consider both ends of the trust relationship and their interaction, partly due to methodological challenges (see however recent analyses such as: Lucas et al. 2024; Valgarðsson et al. 2021). Our paper uses an innovative dataset, the Truedem qualitative dataset, to analyze citizens’ and political elites’ perceptions of and expectations towards one another in the political realm. What are their respective understandings of the good citizens and the good leaders? On what dimensions (democratic governance, policy domains, respective duties, qualities and roles, etc.), can we locate fits and misfits between these mutual perceptions? Our methodology, based on focus-groups with citizens and interviews with political elites, following the principle of a mirror survey, enables us to approach these questions in a relational and contextual way. This paper focuses on the French case, characterized by a comparatively lower trust level, a highly personalized political system and growing polarization these last two decades, with France political space turning from bi-partition to a tri-partition. As the Truedem database enables us to address this question through a comparative approach in 6 European countries the paper will end up opening avenues to such comparison.