Partisan cues and parasocial relationships as shields against accountability: experimental evidence on prime minister evaluation in Europe

Abstract

Political trust is commonly understood as an evaluative judgment of institutional performance, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that citizens’ trust assessments are heavily filtered through identity-based heuristics. This study examines how two distinct but interrelated mechanisms—partisan identification and parasocial relationships (PSRs)—jointly shape citizens’ evaluations of political leaders’ trustworthiness, competence, integrity, and impartiality. We employ a vignette-based survey experiment conducted across five European countries (Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, and Sweden; N  = 2,004), in which respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate either their actual Prime Minister (identity-cueing condition) or an unnamed hypothetical Prime Minister in an average EU country, based on identical mixed-valence performance information. Using Linear Mixed Models with restricted maximum likelihood estimation and Kenward–Roger corrections for small cluster sizes, we find strong support for the role of both mechanisms. First, naming the real Prime Minister activates partisan motivated reasoning: supporters of the PM’s party rate the leader significantly higher on all trust dimensions, while this partisan gap collapses when the leader’s identity is removed. Second, parasocial relationships are associated with resistance to negative information in a manner consistent with an emotional buffer. Respondents with stronger PSR evaluate the leader more positively, and this association is significantly stronger when the leader is identifiable. Third, contrary to expectations, the partisan gap in competence evaluations is not attenuated by the positive competence signal contained in the vignette; opposition voters appear to engage in a reverse halo effect, allowing negative integrity information to contaminate competence judgments when the PM’s identity is salient. These findings demonstrate that political trust is shaped not only by collective partisan loyalties but also by individualized, quasi-interpersonal bonds with leaders, and that these two attachments can both reinforce and substitute for one another in shielding leaders from negative information. Because PSR is measured rather than manipulated, we interpret its buffering role as associational rather than strictly causal.