Political Trust, Political Efficacy and Forms of Participation

In the literature, two competing claims can be found on the relation between political trust and political participation. While some authors argue that trust is a prerequisite for any form of participation to occur, other authors claim that distrust can be a motivating factor for participation in protest politics. The social movement literature suggests that political trust will only have these consequences if it is associated with sufficiently high levels of political efficacy. In this article, we rely on the 2006 European Social Survey for an in-depth analysis of the relation between trust, efficacy and participation. The multi-level regression shows that while trust is positively associated with conventional participation, it is negatively associated with protest politics. The interaction effect with political efficacy suggests that the relation between trust and participation is not as straightforward as is often assumed in the literature. A rather puzzling finding is that even among those who participate in non-institutionalized participation, the belief in the efficacy of these methods remains limited.nrpages: 32status: publishe