Political Interest and Trust in Institutions

A comparison between Germany and Brazil 2013-2018

Abstract

The objective of this work is to contribute to the debate on the distinction between countries with consolidated democracies and countries in the process of consolidation. The research problem is: what is the relationship between the level of trust in political institutions and the interest in politics in Germany and Brazil? As an investigative hypothesis, we adopted the perspective that (i) the greater the interest in politics, the greater the confidence in the government, in political parties, and in the parliament, that is, in political institutions and, consequently, (ii) the German population trusts its political institutions more because it has a greater interest in politics when compared to Brazil. The quantitative methodology compared data available in the sixth and seventh waves of the World Values Survey. The results confirm the hypotheses.