Youth, Institutional Trust, and Democratic Backsliding

In recent decades, many countries ranging from quasidemocratic regimes to well-established democracies have faced democratic backsliding. In this study, we draw on Foa and Mounk and other related literature to examine the effects of regime delegitimation on democratic backsliding, focusing on youth’...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills) 2020-08, Vol.64 (9), p.1366-1390
Main Authors: Kwak, Joonghyun, Tomescu-Dubrow, Irina, Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., Dubrow, Joshua K
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Democracy
Legal system
Legislatures
Liberal democracy
Older people
Panel data
Political institutions
Political parties
Political systems
Politics
Polls & surveys
Recycling
Trust
Youth
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Summary:In recent decades, many countries ranging from quasidemocratic regimes to well-established democracies have faced democratic backsliding. In this study, we draw on Foa and Mounk and other related literature to examine the effects of regime delegitimation on democratic backsliding, focusing on youth’s trust in political institutions—parliament, legal systems, and political parties—relative to trust of the older population. We use an unbalanced panel data set that combines a country-year indicator of liberal democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project with aggregate survey-based measures of absolute and relative institutional trust from the Survey Data Recycling database; the data set covers 46 countries from 2009 to 2017. We find that the ratio of youth’s institutional trust to that of older persons has a substantive effect on the quality of liberal democracy in the future, and that the effect is amplified by the relative size of the youth population.
ISSN:0002-7642
1552-3381
DOI:10.1177/0002764220941222