Trust in democratic parliaments suffers ‘global decline’, study finds
The report’s lead author said such declines tend to be associated with increased support for populist and anti-establishment parties.
Trust in governments and political parties has been declining in democratic countries around the world, according to a new study.
Researchers from the University of Southampton analysed 3,377 surveys covering 143 countries between 1958 and 2019, representing more than five million survey respondents.
They found that while trust in representative institutions such as parliaments was “generally in decline”, trust in non-representative elements such as police, civil service and legal systems had remained stable or rising.
Dr Viktor Valgardsson, lead author of the study published in The British Journal of Political Science, said that the findings were a “warning sign” that autocratic leaders could take advantage of the opinion shift and become more powerful.
He said: “The decline of public trust in political authorities is central to the challenges facing democratic governments in many countries today.
“Low political trust tends to be associated with support for populist parties and leaders who rail against the political establishment.
“It also makes it harder for governments to respond to crises such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic.
“In the United States, trust in federal government has been in sharp decline over the past couple of decades and it is no coincidence that we are now seeing a dramatic assault on democratic institutions there, led by a candidate who was elected after promising to do exactly that.
“While there is still evidence that citizens largely support the idea of democracy, large numbers of them have lost faith in the institutions that are needed for democratic governance, leading some of them to vote for candidates who appear intent on dismantling democracy as we know it.”
The study found that overall trust in parliament had declined by 9% from 1990 to 2019 across democracies globally, while trust in police had risen by 13 points.
The authors also found that trust in parliament was declining in 36 democracies, including Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Australia and the United States, and had only risen in six.
In the UK, the researchers found that trust in parliament and government had been in gradual decline in recent decades with a “seemingly temporary” recovery around the Brexit referendum.
They also found that trust in the legal system and the police had declined until the 2008 financial crisis but had been rising gradually since then.
The surveys analysed by the team found that trust in governments “took a global nosedive” following the 2008 financial crisis although in Latin America it had been rising until 2014 before it started declining rapidly.
The researchers found no apparent decline of trust in Asia and the Pacific with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ecuador and New Zealand bucking the global trend with growing trust in representative institutions.
Professor Will Jennings, a coauthor of the report from the University of Southampton, said: “Declining trust in democratic institutions isn’t inevitable. If it is something about the way democratic politics is practised that citizens distrust, perhaps those politics need to change.
“Given citizens’ continually high support for democratic ideals, those changes may well be in the direction of more democratic governance, rather than less.”
