Undermining or defending democracy? The consequences of distrust for democratic attitudes and participation

Felix Butzlaff, Sören Messinger-Zimmer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

We can observe a well-documented decline of trust levels in Western societies: from the reputation of political representatives as being ‘not trustworthy’ to the rise of anti-system-oriented populist parties. Yet the implications of different forms of distrust for a society and democratic institutions have been theorized in conflicting ways so far. In order to illuminate existing inconsistencies in social and democratic theory, this article addresses two research questions: What are the implications of different manifestations of distrust for the acceptance of democracy and democratic institutions? How do different forms of distrust affect the motivation to become engaged in democratic decision-making and in civil society institutions? Taking empirical evidence from 25 focus groups in Germany, our findings show that growing social divisions affect the role distrust plays for political interest representation of social groups and for the acceptance of liberal representative democracy.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)249-266
Number of pages18
JournalCritical Policy Studies
Volume14
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2 Jul 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Distrust
  • non-participation
  • populism
  • representation
  • social capital
  • trust

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