Erosion of Political Trust in the Netherlands: Structural or Temporarily? A Research Note

Dalton (2004) shows that citizens in many Western democracies are displaying a trend of decreasing trust in political institutions as parliament and the government and in political authorities ( Dalton, 2004 , 29). In most countries that he studies in detail this decrease is strongest among the younger generations and among the most-educated citizens, so that structural developments such as generational replacement and increasing levels of education will strengthen this downward trend. In this research note, we replicate a part of Dalton's analyses for the Netherlands. The analyses show that the trend in political trust between 1973 and 2001 is upward, not downward. After a dip between 2001 and 2004, trust has been partially restored by 2006. The upward trend and the recent restoration of trust is strongest for the better educated. The results question Dalton's ‘rising expectations’ hypothesis, but suggest instead that general trends are most pronounced among the better educated, conceivably because they are most politically attentive.