Who Cares? Issue salience and the heterogeneity in citizens' approaches to political trust

Abstract

Existing work convincingly shows that citizens judge the trustworthiness of political institutions on the basis of its performance. However, what policy issue citizens consider when punishing or rewarding their representatives remains unclear. While scholars commonly rely on economic performance as a predictor of political trust, the effect of economic satisfaction varies across contexts. At the same time, recent work provides evidence for a performance-political trust link on other policy issues. This article presents a refinement of the trust-as-evaluation approach by acknowledging macro- and micro-level heterogeneity in accountability mechanisms on the basis of issue salience. The findings show that the salience of a policy issue, both at the macro and at the micro level, determines the influence of that issue for performance-based political trust.