Abstract
Political trust is an important indicator of political legitimacy. Hence, seemingly decreasing levels of political trust in Western democracies have stimulated a growing body of research on the causes and consequences of political trust. However, the neglect of potential measurement problems of political trust raises doubts about the findings of earlier studies. The current study revisits the measurement of political trust and re-examines the relationship between political trust and sophistication in the Netherlands by utilizing European Social Survey (ESS) data across five time points and four-wave panel data from the Panel Component of ESS. Our findings illustrate that high and low political sophistication groups display different levels of political trust even when measurement characteristics of political trust are taken into consideration. However, the relationship between political sophistication and political trust is weaker than it is often suggested by earlier research. Our findings also provide partial support for the argument that the gap between sophistication groups is widening over time. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, although the between-method differences between the latent means and the composite score means of political trust for high- and low sophistication groups are relatively minor, it is important to analyze the measurement characteristics of the political trust construct.
Highlights
Political trust remains a prevalent topic in political science research
comparative fit index (CFI) and Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) values decreased more than .01 points and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) value for the invariance model fell below the acceptable limit of 0.05
We have investigated the measurement properties of political trust construct composed of three political trust items by utilizing two datasets
Summary
Political trust remains a prevalent topic in political science research. A vast amount of empirical research into consequences of political trust has shown that citizens with lower levels of trust in political institutions engage less often in institutionalized forms of political participation and more often undertake system-challenging political behavior (Hooghe and Marien 2013), and they are less likely to comply with the laws (Marien and Hooghe 2011). The composite score model that is frequently employed in studies on political trust assumes indicators to be free from measurement errors. While panel data allows us to identify the measurement error, stable trait and over-time change components of political trust, the cross-sectional time series data from the ESS study allows us to explore the comparability of the political trust construct over a longer period of time. Our findings show that composite score models that implicitly assume trust indicators to have equal validity and to be free from measurement errors, tend to overestimate the level of trust for both high- and low-sophistication groups. Our analysis further illustrates that composite score models yield exaggerated estimates of the differences between the trust levels of high- and low-political sophistication groups when the condition of full scalar invariance is not met. In sharp contrast with earlier research these differences are found to be minor
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