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Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of specific support, is even stronger than the reverse. This provides a fundamentally different understanding of the importance of declining political trust in recent years. Rather than simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with political leaders, declining trust is a powerful cause of this dissatisfaction. Low trust helps create a political environment in which it is more difficult for leaders to succeed.

Political trust has become a central focus of political analysis and public lament. Political theorists and philosophers typically think of interpersonal trust in politics as a fragile but valuable resource for a flourishing or stable democratic polity. This article examines what conception of trust is needed in order to play this role. It unpicks two candidate answers, a moral and a responsiveness conception, the latter of which has been central to recent political theory in this area. It goes on to outline a third, commitment conception and to set out how a focus on commitments and their fulfilment provides a better account of trust for political purposes. Adopting this conception discloses how trust relies on a contestable public normative space and has significant implications for how we should approach three cognate topics, namely, judgements of trust, the place of distrust and the relationship of interpersonal to institutional trust and distrust.

Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of specific support, is even stronger than the reverse. This provides a fundamentally different understanding of the importance of declining political trust in recent years. Rather than simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with political leaders, declining trust is a powerful cause of this dissatisfaction. Low trust helps create a political environment in which it is more difficult for leaders to succeed. (American Political Science Review / FUB)

A long-standing argument in the political sciences holds that high levels of inequality are incompatible with democracy. Although a number of studies have by now investigated whether income inequality endangers democratic consolidation and stability through corroding popular support, the findings remain inconclusive. This study provides new evidence for a sociotropic effect of macroeconomic income inequality on trust in the institutions of representative democracy by making use of therandom effects within betweenspecification in multilevel models for data from 28 European democracies over a period of 16 years. The findings show that both long-standing differences in income inequality between countries and changes in inequality within countries over time are negatively related to trust in institutions. While the spirit-level thesis states that this effect should be more pronounced among rich democracies, the findings show that the effect of inequality is stronger in countries that are less affluent. Further analyses on whether the social-psychological mechanism proposed by the spirit-level thesis mediates the effect of inequality on trust document a partial transmission via status concerns and social trust. However, the study suggests that income inequality primarily influences trust in institutions through evaluation-based processes as captured by economic evaluations.

AbstractFor decades, political scientists have hotly debated longitudinal trends in political trust rates. An important undercurrent in the debate is that any decline in political trust might signal a legitimacy crisis. Yet, descriptive figures are unable to distinguish between two interpretations of these downward trends: (i) declines that can reasonably be expected as a reflection of declining political trustworthiness (i.e., procedural or output performance) and thereby reflect critical citizens who monitor their democratic institutions; and (ii) downward trends that are not warranted by democratic performance and thereby suggest a more fundamental disconnect between citizens and their democratic institutions.This research note argues that residuals to multilevel models of political trust allow us to distinguish between these two types, and thereby provide a better understanding of trends in political trust. These residuals do not only reveal short‐term aberrations to the explanatory model (often reflecting short‐lived, country‐specific events), but also the extent to which a country's trust rate systematically underperforms in the middle‐ to long‐term. To the extent that declining trust rates are lower than explanatory models predict, the residuals express excessive distrust. To the extent that declining trust rates are in line with the explanatory models, the residuals reflect critical, monitoring citizenship.We outline the approach of residual analyses as a tool to better understand trends in political trust. We illustrate the use of these residual analyses on a cross‐national, longitudinal data set (the Eurobarometer), covering 15 Western and Southern European countries between 1999 and 2019. While political trust rates fluctuate in all these countries, we only find evidence for a structural decline in two of these countries. In France and Spain political trust failed to recover in line with improving economic and institutional performance after the Great Recession. We then test the versatility of the tool to different conditions, including retests on an alternative set of countries (11 Central and Eastern European countries between 2004 and 2019) and an alternative dataset with different measures and time points (the European Social Survey).Finally, we elaborate on the two main conditions under which residual analyses offer a useful tool to the trend debate in political trust research: (1) a firm understanding of the object‐driven determinants of political trust, and (2) a detailed coverage of country‐wave combinations to separate structural trends from short‐term fluctuations.

This article reviews recent survey-based research on citizens' trust in government, focusing particularly on the United States. It addresses the long-term decline in trust and potential causes for this decline, with an emphasis on the effects of partisanship, polarization, performance, process, and media priming. While dispositions can anchor trust levels, the dominant research findings show that the sources of variation and change in trust are political, if multifaceted, in nature. We discuss new versions of standard measures, call for a renewed look at the distinction between trust in authorities and trust in the regime, review ongoing work on how and why trust matters, and recommend broadening the foci of mistrust to include antiestablishment sentiments and attacks on electoral integrity. How trust intervenes between perceptions of political processes and compliance with authoritative commands is a critical domain for additional research. We conclude with a caveat against confidence that the decline in trust can be quickly or easily reversed.

AbstractAmericans have become less trusting of their federal government since the late 1950s. Most accounts of trust in government are based upon the performance of the economy. I argue that two additional factors are essential for understanding the sharp fall in trust in government in recent years: the level of partisan polarization in the Congress (as reflected in the ideological distance between the parties on roll calls) and the inability of Congress to enact legislation (gridlock).

The concept of trust in the context of voting behavior is difficult to define, because it is not a factor specific solely to this domain. Firstly, trust is an essential element of social life. It is the essence of social capital that has signifi can't impact on many issues – education, economic growth, crime level, quality of functioning of the democratic institutions, community of the citizens. Secondly, in large partly due to the multiple contexts of use of this concept, there are difficulties as regards distinguishing it from related concepts such as empathy, community, respect, kindness, brotherhood, esteem, unity. Despite the many shortcomings and imperfections in the concept of trust, it appears that the concept is well understood intuitively – individuals answering questions in surveys on trust seem to understand the concept very well, and their expressed trust level is proportionate to their individually observable behaviour.

This article illustrates that trust in state government varies considerably across states. Using newly available public opinion data, the authors investigate the effects of political polarization, corruption, income inequality, unemployment, state fiscal conditions, median income, ideology, state size, tax rates, and social capital on differences in trust in state government. A number of these variables have statistically significant effects on trust in state government, including state fiscal conditions, unemployment, state ideology, and corruption. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for policy makers and elected officials.

No government yet established has had the loyalty and trust of all its citizens. Regardless of the popularity of its leaders or how careful they are in soliciting opinions and encouraging participation in the process of policy-making, there are always those who see inequalities and injustices in the society and harbor suspicions of the government's motives and intentions. Resentment and distrust are elements of disaffection and the first step toward resistance. Therefore, even the most dictatorial governments have usually striven to increase their credibility and popularity. For democratic governments, however, the problem of combating distrust and encouraging voluntary acceptance of its institutions and decisions is a paramount concern. One of democratic theory's distinctive characteristics is its strong emphasis on voluntary consent, both as a basis of political obligation and as a central attribute of citizenship. The concern expressed by democratic thinkers about the elements of due process and the protection of opportunities for widespread participation is directed toward the creation of citizens who voluntarily accept the society's goals; "the demand for consent is the demand that the government must be more than self-appointed and must, in some significant way, be the chosen instrument through which the body politic and community acts …."Democracy's guiding ideal is the substitution of mutual understanding and agreement for coerciveness and arbitrary authority in all phases of social and political life. The existence of distrustful citizens who are convinced that the government serves the interests of a few rather than the interests of all is a barrier to the realization of the democratic ideal.