Abstract
Political trust is a perennially important concern and the events of the last few years have, in many ways, heightened this importance. The relevant scholarship has done much to meet this challenge but continues to struggle with definitional unclarities and an inability to provide accounts that consistently operate as expected. The current research seeks to test the potential of a classic model of trust from the organizational sciences that makes specific arguments regarding the psychological nature and mechanisms of the construct in helping to address these concerns. Using data from a national convenience sample, we provide preliminary evidence which suggests that measures and models addressing this theoretical account of psychological trust form unidimensional and reliable measures that may more precisely explain the process of political trust and outperform current measures in predicting relevant correlates. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of our work and, in so doing, lay a foundation for a new research agenda for political trust.
Highlights
Political trust matters [1]
We provide preliminary empirical evidence regarding the utility of this approach and discuss its potential for stimulating a new research agenda for political trust
The historical use of the index alone provides a sufficient rationale for its persistence. These analyses suggest that interpreting the American National Election Study (ANES) index from the perspective of the MDS model and supplementing its measurement with MDS model constructs may provide a much needed basis for future research that, for example, considers when evaluations of government will be more and less related to trust
Summary
Political trust matters [1]. There are certainly important reasons for a society to hold a healthy level of skepticism towards its government [2], but when governments are unable to engender the trust of their constituents they open the door to a host of social costs, ranging from a lack of civic compliance with government orders (e.g., [3]) to opposition to new government programs or efforts to increase security (e.g., [4]), and may even facilitate civil conflict or separatism (e.g., [5]). Despite important advances (see [6]), political trust remains a complicated construct, often most clearly defined by measures which are themselves bogged down by continual concern over what they represent (see [6,7]). It is, as yet, unclear whether measures like those used in the American National Election Study (ANES), the World Values Survey, or the General Social Survey assess trust or whether they integrate related constructs like trustworthiness, satisfaction, or confidence.
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