Political trust and democracy: the critical citizens thesis re-examined
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article empirically assesses competing perspectives of the relationship between democracy and political trust. We conduct multilevel analyses on a cross-national panel dataset of 82 countries for the period 1990–2020. The findings suggest that there is a strong, negative relationship between democracy and political trust that cannot easily be dismissed as an artifact of model misspecification or response bias. Moreover, we re-examine the critical citizens thesis by disaggregating political trust into trust in partisan and “non-partisan” institutions to test the claim that well-functioning democracies contain and channel distrust into the more partisan political institutions to keep distrust from generalizing to the entire political system. The results fail to find a statistically significant difference of the effect of democracy on trust between partisan and non-partisan institutions, suggesting that low political trust within democracies may be a more acute problem than much of the literature suggests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".