The micro–macro interactive approach to political trust: Quality of representation and substantive representation across Europe

The relevance of the macro-context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more-educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro–macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual-level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro-level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual-level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro-context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country-year combinations), enriched with country-level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi-level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro–macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more-educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.     

Appropriateness and Consequences: The Logic of Neo-Institutionalism

Skeptical questions may be raised about the neo-institutionalist approach of James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, in which a "logic of expected consequences" is set against a "logic of appropriateness": (1) it is difficult to determine what kind of constructs the so-called logics are—whether they are to be seen as perspectives, theories, or ideal types; (2) the logics, far from being mutually excluding, overlap very considerably; (3) analytical utility is debatable not only in the case of the "logic of expected consequences" but also when it is a matter of the "logic of appropriateness"; (4) the normative virtue of substituting a "logic of appropriateness" for a "logic of expected consequences" is less obvious than March and Olsen's readers may be led to think. It is tempting to conclude that March and Olsen's approach has proven compelling because of its consequences for the scholarly community rather than by virtue of its analytical appropriateness.