• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.79-115
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• 2021

Voters' negative evaluations of government performance lower their trust in government, which functions as the reward and punishment for the government. Trust in government thus serves to promote political accountability of the representative government. However, voters build their confidence toward the party government where the ruling party is responsible for the performance. Considering this partisan nature, we empirically examine that the influence of voters' performance evaluations on governmental trust is conditional on their party identifications. While higher perceptions of political/social conflict and increasing negative evaluations of government policies and economic performance are associated with the lower level of confidence in government, the relationship is contrasted between different party identifiers. For supporters of the ruling party in 2020, the negative evaluations of government performance are not likely to reduce trust in government a lot. On the contrary, those who identify with the main opposition party show the most prominent effect of negative evaluations on their distrust in government. This study demonstrates that trust in government is affected by voters' partisan preferences, not entirely by evaluations of government performance. Such a distortion of the reward and sanction function of governmental trust might lead to the weakening of the accountability mechanism in representative democracy.