Political trust is in decline in many contemporary democracies. Indeed, the growing literature on political trust has already taught us much about the manifold causes of this downturn. Economic and social performance is at the top of this list, especially in Europe where, in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, the economic and social crises had been put forward as one main explanation (Ellinas and Lamprianou, 2014; Dotti Sani and Magistro, 2016; Van Erkel and Van Der Meer, 2016; Dustmann et al., 2017; Foster and Frieden, 2017; Van der Meer, 2017; Ruelens, et al., 2018) together with the fiscal crisis and its consequences in terms of welfare retrenchment (Polavieja, 2013; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, 2017). Other scholars have stressed the significance of the shortcomings of the political process (Grimes, 2006; Van der Meer, 2010; Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012; Chang, 2013; Bauhr and Grimes, 2014; Torcal, 2017; Van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017). These shortcomings are manifested in citizens’ perceptions that political actors are not responsive to their demands and concerns which, in turn, have a negative effect on political trust (Torcal 2014; Linde and Peters, 2020). Finally, political trust has also been linked to political corruption (Della Porta, 2000; Pharr, 2000; Uslaner, 2002; Uslaner, 2017).

However, only limited evidence exists on how each of these factors shapes political trust over time. This study contributes to the debate by providing two complementary longitudinal analyses of these factors in Spain: we first analyse a pooled dataset based on the Spanish samples of the Eurobarometer between 1997 and 2019, where our focus lies at the contextual-level. The rest of the analysis is based on an individual-level panel survey during 2015.

The case of Spain is well-suited for testing the effects of the three factors on political trust, as periods of political stability and economic growth have alternated periods of great economic and political distress. Moreover, political trust has declined substantially since 2008 despite its already low levels, becoming one of the European countries with the lowest levels of political trust (Torcal and Christmann, 2020). By the end of 2019, only one in 10 citizens expressed trust in the representative institutions of the Spanish state. ¹ This renders it an interesting country to study.

This remarkable decline in political trust in Spain has opened a debate on its causes, reflecting the larger debates in this field of study. Some scholars attribute it to the 2008 Great Recession and its social consequences that were particularly harsh in Spain (Polavieja, 2013). Other authors blame the defective functioning of the political process during the crisis (Orriols and Cordero, 2016). In this latter line of thought, the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity measures constituted a ‘stress test’ of Spanish democracy in the eyes of most of its citizens, resulting in a negative assessment of its functioning (Torcal, 2014).

Yet there also exists a third, alternative explanation for the deterioration of political trust in Spain: the great political distress caused by a series of major corruption scandals in the 2010s. In 2012, the newly elected conservative Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, not only faced the debt crisis but also was confronted with a series of corruption scandals related to the illegal funding of his political party, the Partido Popular (PP), and the subsequent salience of the topic in the political agenda (Orriols and Cordero, 2016). Scandals also affected, although to a lesser extent, other political parties, such as the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) in the Andalusian region and Convergencia i Unió (CiU), the former conservative Catalan nationalist party.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows: First, a summary of the literature is provided and focuses on the three explanatory factors to elucidate political trust and on which the study formulates empirical expectations/hypotheses. Second, the Spanish case is described to provide in-depth information about the manifold corruption incidents that haunted Spanish politics in the previous decade. The third section describes the research design, the model specification, the datasets employed and the results of two complementary analyses. The last section concludes and puts the empirical findings into perspective.

In recent academic debates, scholars often emphasise “performance” evaluations when it comes to explaining trends in political trust in contemporary democracies. Here, experts often adopt a “trust-as-evaluation” approach, in which people tend to trust institutions more or less following rational calculations and depending on how trustworthy they perceive each institution in relation to its benchmarks (van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017). Attention is directed towards aspects related to the output-side of the political system, that is it, whether the (democratic) government is effective and performs well, ensuring wealth and affluence (Scharpf, 1999; Rothstein, 2009; Martini and Quaranta, 2020).

The stark decline of political trust among the worst affected countries of the 2008 economic and fiscal crisis helped to confirm the idea that people change their attitudes because of instrumental evaluations of economic and social conditions. Hence, political trust at the societal-level depends on the institutional capacity to meet and represent citizens’ social and economic needs and demands, which are mostly rooted in socio-economic (self-) interest. Thus, economic stewardship is typically identified as a leading cause of trust: when citizens are dissatisfied with economic performance, distrust of government ensues, whereas the reverse effect is produced when economic prosperity abounds (Hetherington, 1998; Citrin and Luks, 2001; Listhaug, 2006; Offe, 2006).

This effect could be based on two different logics or mechanisms: one direct and one more indirect. The first may be the result of citizens’ sociotropic considerations of the general situation, such as their retrospective evaluation of the country’s economy (Listhaugh and Wiberg, 1995; Miller and Listhaug, 1999; Newton and Norris, 2000; Newton, 2007). In addition, awareness of the depth of the economic crisis is likely to create uncertainty about individual economic futures as well, leading many to feel economically vulnerable (Mughan and Lacy, 2002), negatively affecting institutional trust. Thus, further instrumental economic calculations of the people could also be intertwined with these general evaluations of output performance, affecting institutional trust. Individual experiences of economic hardship can reduce citizens’ degree of trust in institutions whether lasting or transitory (Clarke et al., 1993; Brooks and Manza, 2007). In accordance, recent studies have shown that fluctuations in economic performance affect the levels of political trust over time (Dotti Sani and Magistro, 2016; Van Erkel and Van der Meer, 2016; Van der Meer, 2017; Ruelens, et al., 2018). Finally, following the same logic (Rothstein, 2003; Kumlin, 2004), some authors have also linked the present welfare state retrenchment (Alesina and Wacziarg, 2000; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, 2017) and the experience of unemployment (Gallie, 1994; Polavieja, 2013) with declining trends in institutional trust. Thus, social and economic performance evaluations can affect institutional trust and such a decline in trust could be the product of more instrumental evaluations of the personal consequences of the crisis.

Alternatively, several studies also argued that political institutions are increasingly perceived as unresponsive to citizens’ demands (Norris, 2011; Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012; Harteveld et al., 2013) and that the decrease in political trust is a symptom of perceived deficits in the functioning of the political process (Alesina and Wacziarg, 2000; Pharr et al., 2000). This process-oriented research was initiated by (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 1995; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002), and it has been paying attention to either subjective perceptions or objective indicators of ‘institutional fairness’ (Anderson and Tverdova, 2003; Kumlin 2004; Grimes, 2006; van der Meer, 2010; Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012; Linde, 2012; Bauhr and Grimes, 2014; Persson et al., 2017; van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017). Although, this is an important element to consider, citizens’ evaluation of the political process also entails responsiveness, which can be defined as the short-term match between what people want and what they receive from political parties and leaders in terms of policies and policy output (Linde and Peters, 2020: 291; see also Torcal, 2014). In many cases, this hypothesis had not been contrary to the importance of the instrumental economic/social calculations of economic performance but rather complementary. Thus, the increasing political distrust of the public is probably not only a direct effect of the Great Recession and its social consequences, as has been argued, but also the consequence of how responsive political authorities and political representatives have been with citizens’ demands in coping with the consequences of the economic crisis (Torcal, 2017).

Finally, another factor considered by the comparative literature on the evolution of political trust is the negative effect of political corruption. Initially, an essential aspect of this literature is linked to the literature on output performance, which highlights the indirect effect of corruption through its effects on the procedural performance of political institutions or the difficulties it poses on governments in producing policies and services in response to the demands of the general public (Rothstein, 2003; Warren, 2004; Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005; Catterberg and Moreno, 2006; Rothstein and Stolle, 2008; Ariely and Uslaner, 2017).

The studies on this topic have employed two approaches to examine the effects of corruption on political trust. The macro-contextual approach emphasises the aggregate performance of institutions in avoiding corruption (Mishler and Rose, 2001; Harring, 2013) and the necessity of creating auditing mechanisms for its control (Rothstein 2021). Alternatively, the micro-level approach links individual perceptions of corruption to the political integrity of institutions and main political actors (i.e. politicians and political parties), which negatively influences political trust (Chang and Chu, 2006; Uslaner, 2011; Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012; Chang, 2013; Uslaner, 2017). Accordingly, political corruption is not so much an indicator of the performance of the political process but of the citizens’ perceptions of elite and political actors’ probity which could spread to the rest of the society (Rothstein, 2003), constituting what it has been called as one of the three “p” factors for explaining political trust: performance, process and probity (Citrin and Stoker, 2018; Hetherington and Rudolph, 2015). As, Wang (2016) argued, the focus should be less on the efficiency of the government due to corruption but on its ethics. In other words, leaders’ misconduct during office (Della Porta, 2000; Pharr, 2000) produces a general sense of lack of probity in the institutions and their incumbents.

Previous studies on the relative importance of these three factors are limited and are often based on cross-sectional analysis at the individual or contextual level or do not jointly test these explanations to evaluate the importance of these factors. Thus, the present study contributes to the literature by conducting a longitudinal analysis of the effects of these three factors on political trust. Furthermore, the study focuses on a single country, which allows for a panel analysis at the societal and individual levels to be conducted. Thus, we evaluate the relative effects of performance, responsiviness and corruption on political trust based on the following hypotheses:

H_1A: In times of good economic performance respondents tend to show higher levels of political trust.

As can be observed in Figure 1, political trust in Spain was gradually increasing during times of the economic boom at the end of the 1990s/first half of the 2000s—although at low levels and depending on the type of institution (with the judiciary ending up at the top). Yet, since 2008, political trust in Spain has seen a dramatic decline— even compared to the rest of Europe (Torcal and Christmann, 2020)—from which it has not recovered by the end of the 2010s. This decline, however, has been more conspicuous for the institutions of representation (parliament) and political actors (political parties) than for the legal system. This trend is not only remarkable but also unique because a similar downswing had not been observed during precedings economic crises in Spain (Montero et al., 1997).

The remainder of this article performs a longitudinal analysis of political trust at both the aggregate and the individual level. At the contextual level, we analysed a pooled dataset based on repeated cross-sectional surveys performed in Spain by the Eurobarometer, which allows us to assess if changes in the objective economic and political performance is related to the dramatic decline in political trust at the national level. At the respondent level, the study employed three waves of an individual-level panel dataset CIUPANEL, ⁴ which allowed us to examine the effects of dynamic political and economic perceptions, political responsiveness and political corruption on political trust among the same individuals over time.

Political trust in Spain was gradually increasing during times of the economic boom at the end of the 1990s/first half of the 2000s but has suffered a dramatic decline after the financial and debt crisis after 2008 from which it has never recovered—despite a economic recovery after 2013. This article centred around this problem, contributing to the debate on the consequences of economic performance on citizens’ trust in representative institutions and the judiciary when compared with the effect of two relevant factors, corruption and evaluations of the political process, which we found to be highly relevant for the Spanish case as well.

The preceding analysis is based, firstly, on a pooled dataset from the Spanish Eurobarometer surveys between 1997 and 2019 and, secondly, on an individual-level panel data set collected during 2015 in Spain. Our focus with the first dataset was to perform a test of the three relevant factors at the societal-level, allowing us to unpack their relative importance on the evolution of political trust in Spain over time. The second analysis explained changes of political trust “within” respondents over time, thus focusing on changes in individuals’ perceptions, evaluations and personal situations.

The data assembled in this study strongly suggests that the Great Recession has indeed been responsible for the strong decline in political trust in Spain. It has been one of the worst affected countries of the financial and public debt crisis and its social consequences were particularly harsh. A second, more indirect explanation can be found in the perceived inability of Spanish politicians have been adequately responsive while they were coping with the crisis, likely contributing to the breakdown of the two-party system in Spain (Orriols and Cordero, 2016). Yet, Spain has also suffered a series of major corruption incidents in the 2010s—involving high ranked members from different political parties across the ideological spectrum—and these scandals have likely also undermined people’s belief in the probity of political elites. We believe that these latter two explanations, perceived shortcomings of political responsiveness and salience of corruption have contributed to the suppression of trust in representative institutions after 2012—even after the economy gradually started to recover. The effect of perceived corruption on political trust was particularly salient for the judiciary, showing how political trust is also object-dependent.

Low levels of political trust constitute an important problem for many contemporary democracies as well. An often expressed hope is that political trust should recover as soon as economic and social problems are mitigated or resolved. Hooghe and Okolikj (2020) show that this appears to be the case for Europe at large and that respondents across Europe have reacted positively to economic recovery, restoring trust to pre-crisis levels. However, this finding does not reflect the situation in Spain, where political trust remains considerably low. Here, the crisis might have served as a “performance test” for the Spanish democracy, the perceived failure of which led to a decline in peoples’ evaluations of the responsiveness of the political system, which, combined with a series of political corruption incidents hindered the recovery of trust in representative institutions. This combination has likely also paved the way to the proliferation of populist and right-wing parties in Spain that often appeal to their greater moral integrity and transparency. In our opinion, we might also obtain similar results when this model is applied to other South-European countries, which are facing similar problems of corruption and deficits in the democratic process such as Greece or Italy who have also failed to restore political trust to pre-crisis levels.

This observation indicates the possibility that economic performance and the quality of governance/public administration might constitute necessary but not sufficient conditions for a trusting citizenry. In the face of prolonged economic malaise, political trust might erode, no matter the state of their democracy. Conversely, even with a strong economy, if countries fail to be responsive to citizens’ demands, they could be expected to lose confidence in their (democratic) political system (Torcal, 2014; Linde and Peters, 2020). Or, is it only during an economic crisis that people consider these aspects, and does their tolerance for such aspects increase if the economy is booming? One avenue for future research could be to assess the relative weight of each factor and investigate the conditions under which a particular factor matters more.