More or less diffuse: Measuring and manipulating political trust and support

In this study, I will present the results of an original survey experiment where I investigate the nature and relationships between different measures of political trust, satisfaction with democracy, support for democracy and social trust. Using the theoretical framework of 'diffuse' and 'specific' political support, I will use survey vignettes to manipulate respondents' view of government and test whether these manipulations affect some measures more than others. I hypothesize that survey vignettes should be more likely to affect more specific, superficial and ‘evaluative’ forms of trust and support, and less likely to affect more diffuse, deep-seated and affective forms. I will test this expectation by comparing measures of trust in government with measures of support for, and satisfaction with, democracy that are traditionally considered more diffuse. I then will apply the same comparisons to explore whether different measures of political trust used in existing surveys may be capturing different types of political trust; whether some tap into more deep-seated sentiments about government whereas others tap into more malleable evaluations of performance and behaviour. For this purpose, I compare the ‘trust in government’ (ANES) battery; the WVS battery of confidence in institutions; the ‘competence, benevolence and integrity’ (CBI) battery proposed by Grimmelikhuijsen and Knies; the ‘trust, mistrust and distrust’ (TMD) battery developed by the TrustGov research project; and the ‘willingness to accept vulnerability’ (W2AV) battery proposed by Hamm et al.