The macro-consequences of political trust

Political trust is widely regarded as essential for the survival and flourishing of democratic societies. This implies important macro-consequences of trust: the expectation is that low levels of political trust in a society lead to a lower quality of democratic government and perhaps even regime breakdown. However, these expectations have barely been put to the test so far. This is likely because it is in fact very difficult to test them empirically, because of the relatively small number of country-level trust observations and the high risk of confounders. In this chapter, we describe how recent advances in data availability and causal methodology provide opportunities to finally grapple with these questions more properly. We also sketch out the main expectations in the literature when it comes to the macro-consequences of trust, highlighting some important avenues for research as well as some unresolved theoretical questions.