Abstract
Longitudinal trends in the decline of institutional trust are a worldwide concern, with implications that this may be a sign of less engaged democracies. However, no clear correlation has been observed between the 170 decline of institutional trust and shrinking political participation. The current study examined the relationship between trust and participation, using 13 country Asian Barometer survey data with Hierarchical Linear Models. The results show that trust leads to the decline of political participation, but no path was detected from the support of liberal democratic values to participation. On the other hand, distrusters (or critical democrats) who are interested in politics are inclined to participate. A cross-level interaction between aggregate country-level Asian values and trust shows an intervening effect in that trusters in high political involvement are more likely to participate under high paternalistic regions, while in harmony-oriented cultural regions trust decreased participation.
