Researching the individual determinants of trust in politics in Brazil

Abstract

One of the main explanations of the phenomenon of political distrust within current democracies asserts that it has resulted from a process of cultural change that has been leading in the direction of critical citizenship, as this conjugates with an attitude of challenge that takes a clear position in favor of democracy. Although this argument seems to be consistent in regard to solidly established democratic regimes, its critics have pointed out that such a thesis cannot be extended to regimes that have only recently been put in place. In countries of the latter type, the phenomenon would be better explained by citizens’ disenchantment with the concrete ways in which the political system functions, insofar as it does not satisfy the expectations generated throughout the transition process. In this paper we have dealt with this controversy, attempting to test hypotheses for the Brazilian context through research into the individual determinants of political distrust. Using data provided by the World Values Survey, we have proposed an analytical model that confronts different hypotheses on the phenomenon with one another and come to the conclusion that the disenchantment thesis is more empirically consistent for the Brazilian case. Keywords: political trust, democracy, disenchantment, cultural change.