Political trust and the vote in multiparty elections: The Canadian case

Abstract 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 behavioural implications. This article focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984 to 1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behaviour. We build upon M.J. Hetherington's (‘The effect of political trust on the presidential vote, 1968–1996’, American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 311–326) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinomial 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. Contrary to what was the case in the previous two elections, distrustful individuals in 1993 were more likely to vote for the Reform Party or the Bloc Québécois than support the New Democratic Party.