Stability and Change in Political Trust: Evidence and implications from six panel studies

Abstract

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science, and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long-standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility, and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within-individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long-term, with potential for short-term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people’s formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people’s responses to trust questions are remark- ably similar between surveys, and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these ap- pear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redis- tribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and of attitude formation more broadly.

Neither a Trait nor Wildly Fluctuating: On the Stability of Populist Attitudes and its Implications for Empirical Research

“…Political interest is the most stable of the concepts we selected for comparison, given that the trait component is roughly 80 per cent. This finding is consistent with the literature showing that political interest is relatively stable over time (Devine and Valgarðsson 2023; Prior 2010). By contrast, the position on the climate versus economic growth debate has the largest state component.…”

A Crisis of Political Trust? Global trends in institutional trust from 1958 to 2019

“…Dalton (1999, 59) later elaborated that: "As the object of dissatisfaction becomes more generalthe performance of the regime or attachment to the political community -the political implications increase" (van der Meer 2017; Merkel 2014). In this respect, trust in institutions has generally been considered a relatively diffuse type of support (Devine and Valgarðsson 2023;Easton 1975, 447), so declines in this type of support would be considered more serious than, for example, declining support for particular incumbents, but perhaps not as grave as declining commitment to democratic norms.…”