Executive Constraints and Political Trust

Meral Ugur-Cinar is an Associate Professor at Bilkent University’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration. She is the author of Collective Memory and National Membership (Palgrave) and Memory, Patriarchy and Economy in Turkey (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press). Her research focuses on political institutions, regimes, collective memory, social movements, and gender, with articles published in Democratization, Political Studies, Political Quarterly, Memory Studies, Turkish Studies, Social Politics, and Politics & Gender, among others. She is also an editor of Gender, Place, and Culture.

Kursat Cinar is an Associate Professor at Middle East Technical University’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration. He holds a PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University and specializes in party politics, democratization, development, and gender politics. His books include The Decline of Democracy in Turkey (2019) and Women’s Empowerment in Turkey and Beyond (2020). A Fulbright and EU Marie Curie Alumnus, his work has been published in Democratization, Political Studies, Gender, Work & Organization, Political Science Quarterly, and other leading journals. He is an Associate Editor of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies and a recipient of multiple academic awards.

Citation: Ugur-Cinar, M., & Cinar, K. (2024). Executive constraints and political trust. TRUEDEM Blog. https://www.truedem.eu/blog/blog12

It is known in the literature on political trust that trust in state institutions and trust in government are two different things (e.g. Schneider, “Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust?”; Denters, Gabriel, and Torcal, “Political Confidence in Representative Democracies”; Torcal, “Political Trust in Western and Southern Europe.”). Yet under what conditions do these two types of trust co-vary and under what conditions are they relatively independent from one another? We know from the surveys conducted across the world that people usually express more trust in regulative state institutions than in the partisan incumbents of representative political offices, especially the government (Denters et al.; Zmerli, “Social Structure and Political Trust in Europe.”). This divergence in trust is higher in some countries, and lower in others. Why are governmental trust and trust in regulative state institutions similar in some countries and different in others? Does the fact that whether the executive encroaches upon other sections of the state got anything to do with this? These were the questions that motivated our research, which was later published as “The effects of executive constraints on political trust” in Democratization (Cinar and Ugur-Cinar 2018).

Our hunch was that the more restricted the executive, the less regulative state institutions are affected by the fluctuations in governmental trust. When the government cannot encroach upon state institutions, the impartiality and efficacy of regulative institutions are maintained. The less governmental interference to regulative state institutions, the more such institutions will be devoted to the public rather than partisan interests, resulting in a wider gap between state and government trust.

Eager to see whether these expectations hold in reality, we conducted an empirical analysis of a large cross-national panel data based on all existing waves of the World Values Survey (WVS). We gathered public opinion data from all of the six waves of WVS, ensuring a coverage of 73 democratic nations all over the world between 1981 and 2014.

Our concept of “regulative state institutions” included the judiciary, the civil services, and the police. We create a composite variable of trust for regulative state institutions based on principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA underlined that all of the three subcomponents load strongly on our trust in regulative state institutions indicator (factor loadings for the judiciary, the civil services, and the police are 0.88, 0.70, 0.72) and have a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.82, all showing a very strong PCA and creation of a robust latent variable.

We have compared trust in regulative state and governmental institutions based on this research design. Our dataset was a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) panel data with observations for multiple countries and multiple years, ensuring very high representativeness geographically and socioeconomically. Based on a series of statistical tests, we utilized the most fitting model, which was a random-effects generalized least squares (GLS) model with clustered standard errors against heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. The main explanatory variable in our models was executive constraints (the “liberal component index” from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset). We also control for several socioeconomic, political, and demographic variables, including GDP growth, income inequality, educational attainment, electoral systems, federalism, parliamentarism vs. presidentialism, and ethnolinguistic fractionalization, benefitting from several respected data sources such as the World Bank. The dependent variable of our research was the difference between regulative and governmental state institutions. We hypothesized that executive constraints will be positively correlated with this dependent variable, indicating a divergence between trust in regulative and governmental state institutions. 

Our study has shown that the correlation between governmental trust and trust in regulative state institutions is indeed lower in countries with better institutionalized checks and balances. This means that the better executive constraints are institutionalized, the less trust in regulative state institutions fluctuates with governmental trust. A possible explanation for this relationship can be found in the existing literature on executive constraints. For example, Cox and Weingast show that executive constraints are vital not only for the quality of democracy, but also for economic prospects. In light of a panel data from 1850 to 2005, they demonstrate that increased executive constraints significantly diminish economic downturns and foster economic growth. In a similar vein, Henisz argues that increased checks on the executive reduce political volatility since they “minimize the ability of politicians to respond to short-term political or social incentives to favor one group over another or transfer resources from society to the public sector”. Taken together, these studies show that better performance and less volatility in public institutions due to less interference based on short-term political motives can explain our findings.

Better checks and balances are strongly correlated with fewer fluctuations of public trust in regulative state institutions. Considering the vital functions of public trust in state institutions regarding their governability and stability and nations’ economic affluence, maintaining the autonomy of regulative state institutions stands crucial to help ensure more governable, stable, and wealthy states.

As it came to the spotlight with the recent Nobel price of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson once more, and as it was also noted earlier by scholars such as Douglas North, political institutions play a key role in issues such as economic development. This, of course includes the rule of law in particular, which is only possible with a limited executive power. Our research adds to this existing line of research by showing that the trust citizens have in state institutions and thereby in the political system as a whole, is deeply linked with the state of the executive as well. Our findings thus exhibit that, being able to keep the executive in control via checks and balances is vital in maintaining the trust of citizens toward state institutions.

This is of course easier said than done. As the literature on democratic trust has demonstrated, current day trends in democratic backsliding predominantly involve the encroachment of the executive at the expense of other branches of the government, especially the judiciary (ref.). Given this fact, one can also talk of a crisis of trust, in addition to a crisis of democracy in the cases in which the executive breaks free of constitutional constraints. This can of course be counterproductive for most government as a political body that loses trust into state institutions becomes harder to govern. We hope that our findings will serve as important warning signs in that regard.