Investigating Relationship between Institutional Trust and Types of Political Participation: A Case Study of Married Men and Women from Shiraz

During the last three decades, any change in the degree of political participation in most countries has been accompanied by an increase in its informal types. The previous generation of researchers, while relying on the unidirectional logic of Putnam’s theory, assumed that these changes are stemmed from the reduction of institutional trust. Today, multiple rationales have been proposed for relationship between institutional trust and types of political participation. Drawing on Iekeda’s theory which differentiates four distinct patterns of relationship between institutional trust and political participation, this article adopts a quantitative survey method and investigates two active and passive forms of political participation and its relationship with the dimensions of institutional trust among the inhabitants of Shiraz city. The sampling method was quota random stratified method, and a questionnaire was used for data collection. According to the results of the research, the highest and lowest degrees of political participation were respectively participation in elections and participation in political protests. The correlation of the variables such as performance of the executives, perception of the authorities’ characteristics, and functions of institutions with passive political participation was shown to be direct and significantly positive. However, only the variable of the perception of the authorities’ characteristics appeared to be significantly positively correlated with the active type of participation. The most influential variables on the passive and active political participation were the perception of the performance of the executives and gender, respectively. Findings of the study enabled the researcher to conclude that the differentiation of and attention to the types of political participation, in general, and the identification of factors affecting the active