Political trust is widely considered essential for democracy, but empirical evidence testing this hypothesis remains limited. Drawing on research that connects political trust to democratic legitimacy, highlights trust’s behavioural and attitudinal consequences, and underscores its contextual character as a form of political support, we hypothesize that political trust exerts a positive effect on subsequent changes in democratic quality, but only in countries that have already reached a high level of democracy. We test this hypothesis with cross-lagged models fit to political trust estimates from 62 countries over 30 years, combined with democratic quality scores from the Varieties of Democracy project. We find little evidence of an overall effect of trust on democracy, and stronger evidence for a conditional effect: based on our results, political trust has a positive effect on democracy, but only in countries that have already achieved high quality of democracy.
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