Trust in political institutions over the business cycle in Spain

  1. Alvarez Díaz, Marcos
  2. Caballero Miguez, Gonzalo
  3. Manzano, Baltasar
  4. Martín Moreno, José María
Journal:
Notas técnicas: [continuación de Documentos de Trabajo FUNCAS]

ISSN: 1988-8767

Year of publication: 2013

Issue: 734

Type: Working paper

More publications in: Notas técnicas: [continuación de Documentos de Trabajo FUNCAS]

Abstract

The Great Recession has implied a strong increase of the unemployment rate in Spain that surpassed 25% in 2012, the highest rate in western economies. At the same time, trust in political institutions has greatly deteriorated. The goal of this research is to study how trust in political institutions has moved along the business cycle in Spain over the last twenty years by using a battery of standard statistical methods. Moreover, this study also investigates the existence of a long-run relationship applying the autoregressive distributed lag (ADRL) bounds testing approach to cointegration. Once the existence of a longrun relationship is evidenced, we construct a model that allows us to quantitatively evaluate the impact of the business cycle on Spanish political trust. The empirical findings reveal that the unemployment rate has had a significant lagged impact on trust in political institutions.