Authoritarianism, populism and political trust: Illuminating the black box

The paper aims to disentangle the conceptual and temporal relationships between authoritarian attitudes, populist attitudes and political trust. Authoritarianism and populism are here conceptualized as thin centered ideologies (i.e. independent of more substantial left/right cultural or economic attitudes). Operationalized this way, populism should be negatively, and authoritarianism positively related to political trust. A bidirectional negative relationship between consecutive measures of populism and trust is expected (H1a/b), and a bidirectional positive relationship between consecutive measures of authoritarianism and trust (H2a/b). Finally, although authoritarianism and populism have the opposite relationship to trust, these two sets of attitudes often phenomenologically appear together as authoritarian populism. Therefore, based on the thin conceptualization, no significant relationship between authoritarianism and populism is expected, regardless of temporal relationships (H3a, H3b). The hypotheses are tested using SEM on a three-wave, one year interval panel survey data from the Netherlands. Findings confirm negative effect of populism on subsequently measured political trust (H1a), and negative effect of trust on subsequently measured populism (H1b). Interestingly, the effect of populism on trust is stronger than the effect of trust on populism. The positive effect of authoritarianism on subsequently measured political trust is also confirmed (H2a), as well as of trust on subsequent authoritarianism (H2b), although these effects are weaker and temporally less consistent than the effects of/on populism tested in H1a/b. Lastly, political psychology mechanisms are theorized to explain the weak positive effect of authoritarianism on subsequently measured populism (rejected H3a) and a weak positive effect of populism on subsequently measured authoritarianism (rejected H3b).