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  • Despite the often intense public debate about how Icelanders have lost confidence in their regime institutions following the financial crisis of 2008 and policy recommendations on how to restore political trust, no systematic examination on the sources of political trust in Iceland has been carried out. This doctoral research aims to provide theoretical and empirical answers to the question: “what are the determinants of political trust in Iceland?” This includes mapping the dependent variable (i.e. political trust levels in Iceland) over time and studying its relationship with potential explanatory factors. Five theoretical perspectives from political science literature explaining the origins of public trust in political institutions guide the study: modernisation and value change, civic culture and social capital, policy performance, process performance, and electoral outcomes and partisanship. The study’s empirical section is based on repeated opinion survey data from two European programmes, and this data is used to conduct two types of analyses: a longitudinal descriptive analysis and a multivariate analysis. The longitudinal descriptive analysis identifies trends in the development of political trust levels in Iceland from 1983 to 2018, focusing on public trust in the national parliament (Althingi) in a comparative perspective. The multivariate analysis tests five models on the sources of political trust, evaluating the effects of different determinants of Icelanders’ political trust judgements across three time points: 2004, 2012, and 2016. The financial crisis of 2008—the crash—provides a before and after comparison framework for both the longitudinal descriptive and multivariate analyses. The study’s results show that Icelanders are and have been among the most trusting citizens in Europe, placing Iceland among the high trusting Nordic countries. Following the financial crisis of 2008, political trust levels in Iceland followed the same path as was observed in other countries greatly affected by the crisis. Public trust in the institutions and actors of political representation plummeted, while the crisis had a limited impact on trust in institutions on the implementation side of the system, such as the civil service, justice system, and police. The results demonstrate a strong and stable impact of evaluations of policy performance and process performance on political trust. Overall, satisfaction with the state of the economy proved to be the strongest determinant of Icelanders’ political trust over time. Social trust, demographic characteristics, and social status are all predictors of political trust in Iceland. Partisanship in general remained a stable source of political trust across the study’s three time points, while the relative impact of feeling closer to the parties in the coalition government changed significantly following the crash. The post-crisis economic recovery in Iceland has not been sufficient to restore Icelanders’ trust in the parliament Althingi to its pre-crash levels, as the political aftermath of the crisis seems to be having a greater and more prolonged impact on public trust in the key institutions of political representation. (xsd:string)
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  • https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.10734.77124. (EVS) (xsd:string)
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  • 2020 (xsd:gyear)
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  • 10.13140/RG.2.2.10734.77124 ()
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