This article examines the links between education, democratic values, and political trust. Research on education systems as carriers of modern orientations and democratic values worldwide predicts that educated individuals will exhibit more democratic values than less educated ones, regardless of the country’s level of democracy. In the political culture approach, political trust can be understood as a reflection of the congruence or incongruence between individual democratic values and the level of democracy of the political system, which emphasizes trust’s relational character. Integrating these strands of literature, I formulate hypotheses about the mediating effect of democratic values between education and political trust. To test these hypotheses, I employ multilevel models of data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study covering 73 countries. The results show that democratic values partially mediate the effect of education on political trust, but the magnitude of this effect depends on the level of democracy. Analyses also show that, while education is positively associated with democratic values regardless of the country’s level of democracy, this association is much stronger in democratic countries than in non-democratic ones.

中文翻译：

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民主价值观、教育和政治信任

本文考察了教育、民主价值观和政治信任之间的联系。世界范围内关于作为现代取向和民主价值观载体的教育系统的研究预测，无论国家的民主水平如何，受过教育的人都会比受教育程度低的人表现出更多的民主价值观。在政治文化方法中，政治信任可以理解为个人民主价值观与政治制度民主水平的一致性或不一致的反映，强调信任的关系性。整合这些文献，我提出了关于民主价值观在教育和政治信任之间的中介作用的假设。为了检验这些假设，我采用了涵盖 73 个国家的世界价值观调查和欧洲价值观研究的多层次数据模型。结果表明，民主价值观在一定程度上调节了教育对政治信任的影响，但这种影响的大小取决于民主水平。分析还表明，尽管无论国家的民主水平如何，教育都与民主价值观正相关，但这种联系在民主国家比在非民主国家强得多。