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Disentangling an Elusive Relationship: How Democratic Value Orientations Affect Political Trust in Different Regimes

The question whether democratic values are on the rise or in decline has received much attention in political-culture research. Yet, few scholars have studied the consequences either of these trends has for political trust. Although political trust has long been attributed a central role for the functioning and stability of any political system, we still know little about the relationship between citizens’ value orientations and political trust. Recent advances have furthered the discussion by conceptualizing this relationship to be conditional on the respective country’s level of democracy; yet this literature does not take into account findings that demonstrate citizens rarely have an accurate grasp of their country’s democratic quality. Integrating the two strands of literature, this contribution suggests a relationship between democratic value orientations and political trust that is universally contingent on citizens’ perceptions of democratic quality. Testing this proposition for over one hundred democracies and autocracies, it finds that democratic value orientations decrease political trust whenever citizens perceive their regime’s democratic quality as lacking and increase political trust whenever citizens perceive their political regime as being of high democratic quality. In contrast, the actual level of democracy plays no role for the effect of democratic value orientations on political trust.