Social trust and Political Participation – A multilevel analysis of 25 European democracies

The link between social trust and political participation has often been found to be either weak or non-existent. However, these studies have neglected the interaction between different levels of analysis and have instead examined them at either the aggregated level or the individual level. These studies hereby overlook that there are good reasons to assume that the effect of social trust on individual behaviour is context dependent. With the help of multilevel logistic regressions, we examine how four contextual elements affect the impact of social trust on three forms of political participation: voting, institutionalised, and noninstitutionalised participation. The data for the study comes from the fourth round of the ESS from 2008 and include a total of 25 European democracies and 47489 respondents at the individual level. The results suggest that the context does indeed play a significant role in shaping the effect of social trust on political participation.