Webinar in June 2024

Stability and Change in Political Trust Attitudes (June 26, 2024)

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 analysis, 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 [See full article text here].

Daniel Devine is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton, UK. Daniel joined Politics and International Relations at Southampton after three years at the University of Oxford, St Hilda's College. Daniel finished his PhD in Politics at the University of Southampton in 2020. He is affiliated with Nuffield College (University of Oxford) as an Associate Member and also teaches freelance at Lady Margaret Hall (University of Oxford). His research is in the broad fields of public opinion, political behavior, and political psychology; he is primarily interested in how people develop attitudes towards their political systems - such as democratic attitudes, political trust, democratic satisfaction - and the consequences these attitudes have for policy preferences and political behavior. Daniel's work has been published in academic journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Political Science Research and Methods, European Union Politics, West European Politics, and the Journal of European Public Policy, amongst others. He works with a variety of non-academic organizations such as the Institute for Government and Open Society European Policy Institute.