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How can we explain the recent decline of trust in representative institutions of the EU in many of its Member States? This article presents evidence supporting the congruence hypothesis, according to which citizens have been extrapolating their increasing distrust in national institutions to the EU institutions. We also find that these contagion effects are produced by citizens' evaluations of national governments. Furthermore, we show that these spillover effects from the national to the EU level tend to be stronger in situations of economic recession and political crisis. The only counterbalance to this contagion comes from citizens' positive evaluation of EU performance. We test these general arguments based on a twofold panel analysis of the Spanish case, a country that has suffered a remarkable deterioration of political trust in a context of profound economic and political crisis, by analysing data from a micro-level panel study and 28 pooled surveys from the Eurobarometer between 1999 and 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests the links between political and economic performance and satisfaction with democracy (SWD) in Spain. Contrary to the dominant theoretical paradigm that explains the aggregate evolution of and the individual-level differences in SWD mainly by means of economic factors, the article presents evidence that evaluations of the political process are equally relevant to account for both changes in individuals’ SWD over time and the evolution of SWD at the national level. Unlike most existing literature, this study supports its argument by combining analyses of a micro-level panel dataset (CIUPANEL) and of a pooled aggregate-level panel dataset based on the Spanish samples in the Eurobarometer and the Latinobarómetro between 1986 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]