Undeserving rich or untrustworthy government? How elite rhetoric erodes support for soaking the rich

Barton, Richard; Piston, Spencer

doi:10.1080/21565503.2021.1884890

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Finally, what we call 'political event theories' are the most volatile, suggesting that trust judgements can be moved by individual scandals pertaining to politicians or political institutions (Bowler & Karp, 2004;Maier, 2011;Sikorski et al, 2020) and by short-term media framing of politics and politicians (Barton & Piston, 2021;Craig & Rippere, 2014;Newton, 2006). These are judged as the most volatile, since they suggest that shortterm factors such as individual politicians' conduct and the media's framing of political events may shift people's trust judgements, which implies that trust is quite a malleable attitude.…”

Section: Stability and Fluctuation In Theories Of Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Devine¹,

Valgarðsson²

2022

Preprint

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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.

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Section: Stability and Fluctuation In Theories Of Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Devine¹,

Valgarðsson²

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Finally, what we call ‘political event theories’ are the most volatile, suggesting that trust judgements can be moved by individual scandals pertaining to politicians or political institutions (Bowler & Karp, 2004; Maier, 2011; Sikorski et al., 2020) and by short‐term media framing of politics and politicians (Barton & Piston, 2022; Craig & Rippere, 2014; Newton, 2006). These are judged as the most volatile since they suggest that short‐term factors such as individual politicians' conduct and the media's framing of political events may shift people's trust judgements, which implies that trust is quite a malleable attitude.…”

Section: Stability and Fluctuation In Theories Of Political Trustmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stability and change in political trust: Evidence and implications from six panel studies

Devine

Valgarðsson

2023

European J Political Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

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“…Some see attitudes such as party identification and political trust as shaped by people's rational evaluations of e.g., the prospective performance of political actors at any given time (Achen, 1992;Page and Shapiro, 1992) and how those match with people's own social group identity (Gerber and Green, 1998). Others argue that attitudes such as trust are shaped by less rationalistic factors, such as people's biological and genetic personality traits (Cawvey et al, 2017;Mondak et al, 2017) or by the media's framing of politics (Barton and Piston, 2022). Another historically dominant, albeit receding, view is that the vast majority of people simply do not hold coherent political attitudes; that their answers to survey questions are basically random and at best simply taken from elite discourse (Zaller, 1992;Converse, 2006).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Valgarðsson

2024

Front. Polit. Sci.

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A potential puzzle has emerged in the study of political trust: recent studies indicate that individuals' trust judgements are remarkably stable over their life course, but many other studies have observed long-term declines of trust in the aggregate. In particular, trust clearly declined substantially during and following the 2008 economic (and political) crisis in many European countries severely affected by it: especially Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. In this study, I focus on these countries and ask to what extent the crisis may have resulted in a “recession generation” of citizens who were in their formative years at the time and may have adopted less trusting political orientations that have persisted since, more or less independent of life-cycle and period effects. To answer this question, I present descriptive visualizations of trust levels by citizens' age over time and conduct statistical age-period-cohort (APC) analysis of political trust levels using generalized additive models (GAMs) on data from the Eurobarometer (1997–2022) and the European Values Study/World Values Survey (EVS/WVS). The findings are inconclusive: descriptive comparisons of age-by-year diagonals suggest this cohort of citizens may indeed have lower levels of trust than older and younger cohorts, above and beyond the effects of life cycle and period—but the results from GAMs differ between countries and data sources and only show the expected cohort effect in three cases. These tentative results have implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust judgements and the potential socializing effects of major political events on citizens attitude-formation, but they await confirmation in future studies which will have the benefit of longer-term data and potentially further innovations in APC analysis.

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Undeserving rich or untrustworthy government? How elite rhetoric erodes support for soaking the rich

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

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

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

Stability and change in political trust: Evidence and implications from six panel studies

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

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