When and why do citizens distrust politicians? The role of the representative function

我们目前看到，在许多老牌民主国家，人们明显不信任政治。这不仅关系到机构层面的分析，也关系到个人层面的分析。调查发现，相当一部分公民对个别政客不信任。这对自由民主构成了挑战，因为政治家个人是连接公民和国家的关键机制，从而促进了对政治制度的信任。然而，我们对公民何时以及为何信任个别政客的了解仍然有限。拟议的项目通过研究公民对政治家的信任程度和差异的原因，有助于实现这一目标。我们以概念和经验的方式推进这些目标。为了在概念上取得进展，我们强调代表作为个人层面信任的来源的作用。在这方面，我们区分并旨在研究四个维度。我们首先探讨了公民的被代表感，并分析了它如何影响政治信任。其次，我们关注描述性表征，以及代表的社会特征如何影响被表征的感觉和政治信任。第三，我们强调实质代表性，即代表的行为如何影响公民的被代表感和他们对政治家的信任。该项目的核心和第四个贡献是探索代表性的描述性和实质性维度与公民被代表的感觉及其信任水平之间的相互作用。我们认为，仅仅是描述性代表的存在就可能对公民的信念产生积极影响。但是，代表们未能以实质性的方式代表群体利益，将削弱公民被代表的感觉和他们的信任水平。我们认为这种互动是双向的，描述性和实质性的表现相互加强。因此，我们假设，由于这些政治家是谁以及他们所做的事情，人们感到被代表了，并对个别政治家产生了信任。为了研究哪些因素会影响被代表的感觉，我们采用了基于大n的调查方法。在这方面，我们的目标是超越我们传统上在大型调查项目中发现的关于对政治家信任的少数问题所产生的稀缺证据。我们将其与涉及德国、瑞士和英国的小n比较方法结合起来。在此基础上，我们引入了与制度背景相关的差异。最后，我们使用实验方法来改进因果推理。我们对公民进行调查实验，探讨他们对被代表的感觉和信任程度对不同配置的描述性和实质性代表的反应。

We currently witness pronounced distrust towards politics across many established democracies. This does not only concern the institutional but also the individual level of analysis. Significant shares of citizens are found to be distrustful towards individual politicians. This poses challenges to liberal democracy since individual politicians are key mechanisms in linking citizens and the state and thus facilitate trust in the political system. Yet, our knowledge about when and why citizens trust individual politicians remains limited. The proposed project contributes to this end by studying the extent to which citizens trust politicians and the causes for variance.We advance these goals in conceptual and empirical ways. To make conceptual headway, we stress the role of representation as a source of individual level trust. We distinguish and aim to study four dimensions in this regard. We first explore citizen’s feelings of being represented and analyze how it affects political trust. We second focus on descriptive representation and how the social traits of representatives both affect the feeling of being represented and political trust. We third stress substantive representation, i.e. how the behaviors of representatives affect citizens’ feelings of being represented and their trust in politicians. The core and fourth contribution of the project is the exploration of the interplay between the descriptive and substantive dimensions of representation and citizens' feeling of being represented and their levels of trust. We argue that the mere presence of descriptive representatives might have a positive effect on citizens' beliefs. But the failure of representatives to represent group interests in substantive ways will attenuate citizens' feelings of being represented and their levels of trust. We consider this interaction a two-way-street, where descriptive and substantial representation mutually reenforce each other. Thus, we postulate that people feel represented and develop trust towards individual politicians as a consequence of who these politicians are and what they do. To study which factors impact the feeling of being represented, we apply a large-N survey-based approach. In this, we aim to go beyond the scarce evidence emanating from the few questions about trust in politicians that we traditionally find in larger survey programs. We combine this with a small-N comparative approach involving Germany, Switzerland and the UK. With this, we introduce variance with regard to theinstitutional context. Lastly, we use experimental approaches to improve causal inference. We conduct survey experiments with citizens that tap into the question how their feeling of being represented and their levels of trust react to different configurations of descriptive and substantive representation.