Webinar in June 2024

Political Trust and Democracy: the Critical Citizens Thesis Re-Examined (June 05, 2024)

This analysis empirically assesses competing perspectives of the relationship between democracy and political trust. Multilevel analyses on a cross-national panel dataset of 82 countries for the period 1990–2020 was conducted. The findings suggest that there is a strong, negative relationship between democracy and political trust that cannot easily be dismissed as an artifact of model misspecification or response bias. Moreover, the research re-examines the critical citizens thesis by disaggregating political trust into trust in partisan and “non-partisan” institutions to test the claim that well-functioning democracies contain and channel distrust into the more partisan political institutions to keep distrust from generalizing to the entire political system. The results fail to find a statistically significant difference of the effect of democracy on trust between partisan and non-partisan institutions, suggesting that low political trust within democracies may be a more acute problem than much of the literature suggests [See full article text here].

Andrew C. Dawson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Glendon Campus of York University. He is a member of both the Graduate Program in Sociology and the Master’s in Public and International Affairs Program, and an Associate Editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology. In 2019-2020, he was a Visiting Scholar at Massey College, University of Toronto. Originally from Alberta, he joined York University via Montreal, where he completed a MA and PhD in Sociology at McGill University, followed by a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Université de Montréal, jointly held between the Department of Political Science and CÉRIUM (the Centre for International Studies). His primary areas of research interest are political sociology, violence and development, with a focus on state legitimacy, political and social trust, democracy and the rule of law. He pursued an empirical and cross-national research agenda in these fields that draws upon both quantitative and comparative historical methods. This research has been published in various sociology and social science journals, including the British Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Science History, World Development and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.