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

我们目前看到，在许多已建立的民主国家中，人们对政治存在明显的不信任。这不仅涉及机构层面的分析，也涉及个人层面的分析。据发现，相当一部分公民对个别政治家不信任。这对自由民主提出了挑战，因为政治家个人是联系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。本项目通过研究公民对政治家的信任程度以及产生差异的原因来实现这一目标，并以概念和实证的方式推进这一目标。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。我们区分并旨在研究这方面的四个维度。我们首先探讨公民的感受被代表和分析它如何影响政治信任。其次，我们关注描述性代表以及代表的社会特征如何影响被代表的感觉和政治信任。第三，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方面与公民被代表的感觉及其信任程度之间的相互作用。我们认为，描述性代表的存在可能会对公民的信仰产生积极的影响。但是，代表们未能以实质性的方式代表群体利益，这将削弱公民被代表的感觉和他们的信任程度。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，人们感到被代表，并发展对个别政治家的信任，因为这些政治家是谁，他们做什么。 为了研究哪些因素会影响被代表的感觉，我们采用了一种基于大N调查的方法。在这一点上，我们的目标是超越稀缺的证据来自少数问题的信任，在政治家，我们传统上发现在较大的调查项目。我们结合联合收割机，这与小N比较的方法，涉及德国，瑞士和英国。 有了这一点，我们引入了关于制度背景的差异。最后，我们使用实验的方法来改善因果推理。我们与公民进行调查实验，探讨他们的感觉如何被代表和他们的信任程度对不同配置的描述性和实质性的代表性的反应。

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.