Socialized to (dis)trust? About the origins of dispositional political trust

A longstanding argument in the field of political trust reads that trust is the outcome of a process of socialization. This approach tends to emphasize the dispositional element in political trust, i.e., the 'A' in 'A trusts B to do X'. This dispositional element of political trust may be understood as a baseline. While citizens can of course deviate from this baseline in specific circumstances (for instance in response to changing evaluations), this baseline is set and no longer systematically updated in an iterative process. Remarkably, the process of socialization to (dis)trust has not been studied directly. Hence, fundamental questions on the dispositional nature of political trust remain unanswered. Most importantly: To what extent does political trust settle into a disposition? If it does: at which age and under which conditions does political trust settle into a disposition? This paper tests two rivaling models derived from cultural sociology. The active updating model implies that people continue to update their attitudes, making durable within-person changes. The settled dispositions model suggests that these attitudes are relatively stable: longitudinal variation can be understood as random noise to the model. The integration of the two models reads that a period of 'impressionable years' in adolescence or young adulthood precedes the settled disposition. To test these models, this paper employs two panel data sets in the Netherlands that measure trust in politics and other institutions annually: the LISS-panel (covering the adult population) and the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values ADKS (covering students since they started secondary education at age 12). We cover four years (2018-2022), and test to what extent rivaling models hold among different subgroups. Thereby the paper aims to offer a direct assessment of the extent to which political trust has dispositional nature, as well as its origins in adolescence and young adulthood.