Questions of trust and trustworthiness of political institutions are a staple of political science. One can find concerns about the decline of trust going back decades (Easton 1975; Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975) and its importance for contemporary policy making and other outcomes (OECD 2022; Guterres 2018). However, core assumptions in the literature are beginning to unravel. This Workshop brings together scholars of political trust, trustworthiness, and democracy, from a range of perspectives, to mark a breakthrough in our theoretical and empirical knowledge on political trust, democracy, trustworthiness, and their relationships.
Core assumptions in the literature are beginning to unravel. Most problematically, the normative standing of political trust - i.e., the idea that political trust is (universally) good for democracy - is being called into question. At the same time there, is growing criticism regarding its measurement in existing scholarship, and increased uncertainty regarding the (positive) consequences that the literature currently hypothesises (such as for policy support, voter turnout, and much else). Recent book-length treatments attest to these concerns (Seyd 2023; Norris 2022; Jennings et al. Forthcoming). Recent scholarship suggests that political trust is more multifaceted than treated in empirical work (Bertsou 2019a; Intawan and Nicholson 2018), that it is a stable feature of individuals rather than responsive and evaluative (Devine and Valgarðsson 2023), and that it may actually support democratic backsliding or autocratisation (Norris 2022), all of which challenges existing literature, but remains fragmented.
Research is relatively siloed, both in terms of discipline (political science, philosophy, psychology, sociology) and subfield (democratic attitudes, democratisation, political trust, public policy), despite these questions being of keen interest for scholars in those areas. This workshop is an ideal opportunity – and time – to bring these areas together, which seems particularly pertinent given significant upcoming elections (the US and UK in 2024, the EU in 2024, and Germany in 2025, as examples). The Political Psychology SG has not yet organised a JS workshop on trust despite many of its members being interested and engaged in these issues.
Bertsou, Eri. 2019. “Rethinking Political Distrust.” European Political Science Review 11 (02): 213–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773919000080.
Crozier, Michel J, Samuel P Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press.
Devine, Daniel, and Viktor Valgarðsson. 2023. “Stability and Change in Political Trust: Evidence and Implications from Six Panel Studies.” European Journal of Political Research.
Easton, David. 1975. “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support.” British Journal of Political Science 5 (4): 435–57.
Guterres, Antonio. 2018. “Secretary-General’s Address to the General Assembly.” United Nations. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2018-09-25/secretary-generals-address-general-assembly-delivered-trilingual.
Intawan, Chanita, and Stephen P. Nicholson. 2018. “My Trust in Government Is Implicit: Automatic Trust in Government and System Support.” The Journal of Politics 80 (2): 601–14. https://doi.org/10.1086/694785.
Jennings, Will, Gerry Stoker, Daniel Devine, Jennifer Gaskell, and Viktor Valgarðsson. Forthcoming. Trust in Crisis? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norris, Pippa. 2022. In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OECD. 2022. “Building Trust and Reinforcing Democracy: Preparing the Ground for Government Action.” OECD. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/building-trust-and-reinforcing-democracy_76972a4a-en.
Seyd, Ben. 2023. Trust: How Citizens View Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1: Is political trust related to support for democratic principles, and under what conditions?
2: In which cases is political trust supportive of democracy, and in which is it a hinderance?
3: How can we improve the measurement of political trust; are current survey instruments good enough?
4: What mechanisms link trust and different outcomes? What is the causal and observational evidence?
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| Unequal Children Disgruntled Adults? The effect of exposure to inequalities during childhood on social and politicsl trust |
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| Is trust good for democracy? |
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| Education and political trust |
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| Socialized to (dis)trust? About the origins of dispositional political trust |
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| More or less diffuse: Measuring and manipulating political trust and support |
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| Democratic experience matters twice: the cross-national and longitudinal effect of democracy on winner-loser gaps in political trust |
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| Measuring trust and trustworthiness in citizens’ political judgements |
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| Political Trust, Perceived Threat, and Preferences for Alternatives to Representative Democracy |
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| Trust, election interference and coordinated inauthentic behavior |
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| Electoral disinformation and trust in electoral authorities |
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| Place, Performance and Political Trust: The Welfare State as Catalyst and Cushion for the Rural-Urban Divide |
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| Visual Representation in Politics: Examining the Impact of Politicians' Tailored Visual Group Appeals on Female Voters' Trust |
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| Egocentric or sociotropic? The effect of political bias perceptions on trust in impartial institutions |
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| Exploring the Geography of Discontent and its Impact on Political (Dis-)Trust |
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| The politicization of political trust? Supply- and demand-side explanations |
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| Affective underpinnings of political trust: who are the distrustful and why? |
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| Schooling, the higher educated and political trust: Critical citizens, universal democratizers, or defenders of the political system? |
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