IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/aqr/wpaper/202505.html

“The shadow of polarization is long: trust in the government and independent institutions after 142 government changes”

Author

Listed:
  • Luis Guirola

    (AQR-IREA, University of Barcelona)

  • Gonzalo Rivero

Abstract

We study how political polarization impacts trust in the government and independent institutions. We gather microdata from 27 countries over three decades and identify 142 government changes. For each of these events, we run a difference in differences design comparing left and right-wing supporters to identify the effect on trust caused by a particular party controlling the executive. The estimated effect ranges from 0 to 2.1 standard deviations, and is systematically larger when party polarization is stronger– this variable alone explains 72% of the variation. The effect propagates onto trust in the European Central Bank and other institutions outside government control. Examining the mechanism, we find evidence consistent with a) lack of knowledge about independence and b) that elections under high polarization are high-stakes events affecting multiple dimensions, including subjective wellbeing, and trust toward the political system as a whole.

Suggested Citation

  • Luis Guirola & Gonzalo Rivero, 2025. "“The shadow of polarization is long: trust in the government and independent institutions after 142 government changes”," AQR Working Papers 202505, University of Barcelona, Regional Quantitative Analysis Group, revised Jul 2025.
    • Handle: RePEc:aqr:wpaper:202505
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ub.edu/irea/working_papers/2025/202511.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aqr:wpaper:202505. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bibiana Barnadas (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aqrubes.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.