No Longer There for the People? Explaining Trust in Politicians in Eastern Europe

An extensive body of literature has shown that over the last three decades citizens from European countries have low levels of trust in politicians, considerably lower than in public institutions. This downward slope of trust is visible both in established democracies from Western Europe and in new democracies in Eastern Europe. In particular, it remains unclear why levels of trust in politicians continue to be low in this region even after elites were almost completely replaced and thus the explanatory power of the elite reproduction theory diminished. This paper seeks to address this empirical puzzle and aims to identify determinants for the levels of trust in politicians across 11 East European countries (the EU member states). It tests for the existence of cross-national explanations, moving beyond the single-case or contextual determinants for trust in politicians identified by earlier studies. It uses a series of cultural and institutional theories and focus on the importance of assessment of democracy, political interest, and satisfaction with political institutions and their performance. These main effects are tested against other controls using individual level data from European Social Survey (ESS), Wave 6 (2012) that has probabilistic representative samples at national level. The results of the quantitative analysis reveal robust patterns across countries and indicate that institutional performance matter more than cultural determinants when people decide to trust politicians.