Unequal Children Disgruntled Adults? Childhood Deprivation and Political Trust

• In Event: Political Trust

Abstract

It is a long-standing claim within political science that economic inequality leads to dissatisfaction with democracy and distrust in politics. In short, the argument is that high economic inequality is a strong signal that the democratic system does not deliver on a central and often desired parameter: an equal and fair distribution of resources. The general finding in cross-national studies is a negative relationship between inequality and citizens’ support for the political system. However, recent experimental and longitudinal studies suggest that inequality has a limited impact on political trust. Our argument and contribution are twofold. First, we argue that exposure to inequalities during one’s childhood and formative years leaves lasting marks her beliefs about the political system in adulthood. In turn, this could explaining the puzzling eviedence from previous research, where cross-sectional reuslts present significant effect, while longitudinal studies fail to find signifcant short-term effect of inequality on trust. Second, we show what about inequality affects people, namely, exposure to deprivation. We show using a large set of inequality, deprivation and affluence measures–e.g., Gini coefficient, top 10% income share, share of low-income peers, share of unemployed peers, share of rich peers–that exposure to deprivetion is the strongest predictor of contemporary political trust. We test this argument in Denmark, using a rich dataset combining administrative data on the economic characteristics of neighborhoods and schools during their teenage with contemporary survey data on political trust. The findings show that exposure to deprived groups more than the overall income distribution can leave lasting marks on people’s political trust, and the effect is consistent across contexts.

Authors

• Francesco Colombo, Aarhus University

• Peter Thisted Dinesen, University College London

• Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, Aarhus University

• Mathias Kruse, Aarhus University