What Drives Political Trust? An Experiment on Institutional Characteristics, Domains of Action and Individual Values

Political scientists mostly agree that political trust is a relationship in which ‘A trusts B to do X’ (Hardin, 2000). This conceptualization of trust as relational and context-dependent has served as an organizing framework for most studies assessing the determinants of political trust. Focusing on each component of this framework, scholars have pointed to particular traits and values of the subject (A), characteristics of the object (B) and domains and scope of action (X) to explain rising or declining levels of trust. Despite this wealth of knowledge, our understanding of the factors and characteristics most conducive to raising or lowering citizens’ trust remains limited for two reasons. First, the prevalent use of observational studies to assess the impact of these factors on citizens’ political trust fails to isolate the causal impact of these determinants. Secondly, when scholars have sought to address issues of causality they have not highlighted the relative importance of different determinants. Hence, while these approaches have enabled us to develop our understanding of the dynamics driving political trust, they do not tell us which combination of institutional characteristics and specific domains of action feature most prominently in citizens’ confidence in representative political institutions. In essence, we do not know which combinations of A, B and X have a stronger causal impact on citizens’ political trust. To fill this gap we set-up an extensive vignette experiment among 23,000 Dutch respondents. We manipulate the objects of trust (B) along with their defining characteristics and the domain of action being evaluated (X). This gives us the power to isolate the causal impact of a broad range of factors proposed in the theoretical and empirical literature on political trust. More importantly, it also enables us to assess the relative importance of these factors. The complete factorial design, allows us to assess which combination of institutional characteristics, namely accountability, competence, care and reliability, have a stronger causal impact on citizens’ political trust attitudes and the domain-specificity of these effects. Moreover, the study expands the scope of existing research by evaluating how citizen’s values, beyond partisanship, moderate the causal relationship between various institutional characteristics and citizens’ trust and distrust in representative institutions. By exploring the ways in which characteristics of the trust object (B) and the values and preferences of citizens (A) jointly shape political trust and distrust, we provide a deeper understanding of the relational nature of political trust