ABSTRACT
Satisfaction with how democracy works and political trust has generally been quite high in Iceland and on par with the other Nordic countries. Immediately after the economic collapse in 2008, those changed dramatically but seem to have recovered to a pre-crisis level. In this chapter, we first review what the literature says about what maintains high levels of trust and satisfaction with how democracy works and whether those relate to political support and legitimacy, and second, what factors contribute to sharp changes. Our findings indicate the sharp decrease in political trust and satisfaction with democracy did not have a lasting impact. Satisfaction, trust for politicians and for parliament have largely recovered to a pre-crisis level. We found some difference among subgroups, for example, the crisis might have increased tensions between voters of government and opposition parties concerning satisfaction with democracy and distrust for politicians, which is more likely to have had a lasting impact on the dissatisfaction with democracy among older people and those with lower household income.
