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Where Do Distrusting Voters Turn if There is No Viable Exit or Voice Option? The Impact of Political Trust on Electoral Behaviour in the Belgian Regional Elections of June 20091

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Marc Hooghe ,
Sofie Marien  and
Teun Pauwels
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Abstract

It has been suggested that political distrust is associated with lower levels of voter turnout and increased votes for challenger or populist parties. We investigate the relationship between political (dis)trust and electoral behaviour using the 2009 Belgian Election Study. Belgium presents an interesting case because compulsory voting (with an accompanying turnout rate of 90.4 per cent) compels distrusting voters to participate in elections. Nevertheless, distrusting voters are significantly more inclined to cast a blank or invalid vote. Second, distrust is positively associated with a preference for extreme right (Vlaams Belang) and populist (Lijst Dedecker) parties. Third, in party systems where there is no supply of viable challengers (i.e. the French-speaking region of Belgium), the effect of political trust on party preference is limited. We conclude that electoral effects of political distrust are determined by the electoral and party system and the supply of electoral protest.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , 2011 , pp. 245 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011.

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Footnotes

1

This research project was made possible by the generous support of the Belgian Federal Science Agency, Inter-University Attraction Pole on Participation and Representation.

References

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48 There is no significant relation between political trust and panel dropout, indicating that there is no significant relation between political trust and attrition in our sample.

49 European Social Survey, ‘ESS-3 2006 Documentation Report. Edition 2.0’, Bergen, European Social Survey Data Archive, Norwegian Social Science Data Services, 2007; European Social Survey Round 3 Data, ‘Data File Edition 2.0’, Norway, Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Data Archive and distributor of ESS data, 2006 (ESS data is available at http://ess.nsd.uib.no/).

50 Belgium is divided in separate electoral districts per region, which implies that voters can only vote for those parties that use the language of that region.

51 In a separate analysis voting preference in the first wave was used as a dependent variable. This did not lead to substantially different results.

52 We also controlled for economic voting motives but these variables did not significantly contribute to the explanation of party choice and were therefore not included in the final analyses.

53 The strong deterrent effect of compulsory voting might partly be caused by some confusion among potential voters. While courts no longer prosecute non-voters, they still keep track of voters that are randomly assigned to ‘voluntarily’ man the polling stations. Citizens who fail to perform this civic duty are prosecuted, and this is well-publicized.

54 Alan Agresti, An Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis, 2nd edn, Hoboken, Wiley, 2007.

55 It has to be noted here that we created three equal groups for the political trust variable. Logistic regression models are sensitive to ‘incomplete information’. Given the number of variables in our model, including the full range of this variable would inevitably lead to too high a number of empty cells in the dataset. Recoding the possible values as three categories reduces the number of empty cells to an acceptable rate, improving the estimation precision of the parameters. An alternative analysis using the full range of the trust variable resulted in identical results (but should be considered less stable due to the high number of empty cells).

56 The relation is only significant at the .05 level due to the limited number of respondents casting an invalid or blank vote.

57 The explained variance is indeed larger for Flanders than for Wallonia when only political trust is included as explanatory variable.

58 For all other political parties including the variable ‘willingness to vote’ did not change the significance level of the results.

59 Miller and Listhaug, ‘Political Parties and Confidence in Government’. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963. European Social Survey Round 3 Data, ‘Data File Edition 2.0’, Norway, Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Data Archive and distributor of ESS data, 2006 (ESS data are available at http://ess.nsd.uib.no/.