Political Trust and the Vote in Multiparty Elections.

While the causes of declining political trust have been investigated extensively in the literature, much less empirical effort has been devoted to the study of its political consequences. This paper focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984-1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behavior. We build upon Hetherington’s (1999) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinominal logit estimations are performed using individual-level survey data from three Canadian federal elections. While distrust is shown to significantly affect electoral participation, thus acting as an alienating factor, the results indicate that decreasing trust acts more as a motivation to support third-party alternatives. The study further demonstrates that in a multiple party setting, "old-line" major parties electorally suffer from declining political trust, but some third parties benefit more from this phenomenon than others. In particular, the transition from a three- to a five-party system in the 1993 Canadian election and the Reform Party’s efforts to attract support from distrustful voters seem to have eroded the New Democrats? role as a vehicle of distrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]