Knowing or Believing? Political Interest, Institutional Trust and Turnout in the Arab World

Does trust in national institutions make people more likely to vote, or does attention to politics matter more? The literature points both ways for the Arab world, where elections take place in contexts of contested legitimacy. Using Wave VII of the Arab Barometer (2021-2022), this paper tests the association between self-reported turnout, trust in the national government and political interest among 19,525 respondents in the nine countries with valid data on all items. In logistic regressions with country fixed effects, a one-point increase in political interest (four-point scale) is associated with a 7.1 percentage-point higher probability of reporting having voted, against 2.3 points for trust. The interest effect is positive in every country but varies significantly in size, from above 10 points in Morocco and Lebanon to near zero in Jordan and Sudan. A cluster analysis of trust in four institutions shows that only broad, consistent trust goes with higher turnout; selective trust looks much like distrust. Results hold across 128 alternative specifications. All estimates are associational.