A study on how political debates shape citizens' trust judgement of politicians and the political system

While it is claimed repeatedly that political debates in the media have coarsened over time leading to detrimental effects on citizens’ political trust, little effort has been made to investigate this. The question how the media influence political trust is of paramount importance as political trust is a key resource for a democratic political system influencing citizens’ willingness to commit public resources to policy ends and accept political decisions. Within this research project, a framework will be developed to theorise and analyse the effect of the deliberative quality of political debates in the media on political trust. Using content analysis techniques and building on the deliberative democracy literature, the trends in the deliberative quality of the political debate in the media in Flanders (Belgium) will be studied between 1980 and 2015. Using experiments, we will shed light on the effect of the quality of political debates in the media on political trust. This project is theoretically innovative by integrating media-effects literature and deliberative democracy literature and empirically innovative by gathering a unique and comprehensive dataset. As a result, this project will contribute substantially to the scholarly, societal and political debate on the trends within the deliberative quality of political debate in the media and the functioning of political debate in the media and the functioning of representative democracy in general.