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 remarkably 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 appear 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 redistribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and 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.…”

The recession generation? Age-period-cohort dynamics of political trust in six countries severely affected by the 2008 crisis

“…There is a long history of debates within political science about the extent to which attitudes such as trust are based on people constantly updating rational evaluations of their environment (Achen, 1992;Page and Shapiro, 1992) or are instead more or less stable throughout their lives, shaped more by factors such as their personality (Cawvey et al, 2017), parental influence (Jennings et al, 2009) and other agents of socialization in their formative years (Hyman, 1959;Kiley and Vaisey, 2020). Recent studies have suggested that individuals' trust judgements are largely stable over a long period of time, but most prone to change in early adulthood and responding to political events in the short-term (Kiley and Vaisey, 2020;Devine and Valgarðsson, 2023). The results reported here may speak to that literature, as it provides some indications that citizens who experienced their formative years during the 2008 crisis may have carried lower levels of trust into adulthood, beyond the period effects of the crisis.…”

“…Two recent empirical studies of individual-level panel data also suggest that people's political trust judgements are most susceptible to change in their formative years-and mostly stable after that (Kiley and Vaisey, 2020;Devine and Valgarðsson, 2023). However, studies have long documented aggregate changes in levels of political trust over time within societies: for instance, concerns about declining political trust in the United States date back at least to the 1970s (Miller, 1974;Lipset and Schneider, 1983;Dalton, 2004Dalton, , 2017Citrin and Stoker, 2018) and the same appears to apply at least to several other established democracies (Dalton, 2004(Dalton, , 2017Torcal, 2014;Jennings et al, 2017;Dassonneville and McAllister, 2021).…”

“…In the short-term, dynamic changes in trust on the aggregate might be explained by individuals temporarily adjusting their trust judgements in response to events and political contexts; the two recent panel studies (Kiley and Vaisey, 2020;Devine and Valgarðsson, 2023) both suggest that this does happen but that individuals relatively quickly tend to revert back to their baseline levels of trust. As such, those findings indicate that any long-term changes in trust are likely to be driven largely by generational replacement, and in turn by the different social and political contexts in which successive generations are socialized.…”

“…A bit of a puzzle has started to emerge in the study of political trust dynamics: on one hand, aggregate levels of trust have been gradually declining in many countries in recent decades (Dalton, 2004(Dalton, , 2017Torcal, 2014;Jennings et al, 2017;Dassonneville and McAllister, 2021) and took a particular dive in many countries following the 2008 financial crisis (Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014;Kroknes et al, 2015;Önnudóttir et al, 2021). On the other hand, individuals appear to be very reluctant to substantially change their trust judgements over time, even during times of political turmoil (Kiley and Vaisey, 2020;Devine and Valgarðsson, 2023).…”