Welfare Attitudes, Political Trust and Its Determinants in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Korea is characterized by the state's low responsibility for welfare provision and low political trust, while Sweden exemplifies a welfare state with universal welfare provision and high political trust. These characteristics in Sweden arouse interest in the question of whether political trust is causally linked to welfare attitudes and what factors influence political trust. Thus, the present study aims to explore whether political trust affects welfare attitudes and what factors are influencing political trust in Sweden. From the perspective of welfare attitude's multi-dimensionality, the author conducted a quantitative research with different statistical methods, Ordinal Logistic Regression and Multiple Linear Regression, depending on the scale of dependent variables, using data from the 2016 European Social Survey. The key findings of the research are that political trust does not significantly or strongly influence the goal and range dimensions of welfare attitude, while it significantly and strongly affects the implementation and outcome dimensions in Sweden and that political trust is not significantly affected by formal and informal networks, electoral and institutionalized participation, internal efficacy, media exposure and socio-economic variables, while it is significantly affected by social trust, non-institutionalized participation, government performances, external efficacy, policy issue, partisanship and political interest. The author concludes that political trust does matter for welfare attitudes in Sweden and that politicians and political institutions' responsiveness, government performances and policy issue are major determinants of political trust.