Measuring trust and trustworthiness in citizens’ political judgements

Analysts often stress the importance of distinguishing between ‘trust’ (a judgement about, or action relating to, another person or agency) and ‘trustworthiness’ (the qualities of that person/agency giving rise to trust). Trust focuses attention on the judgements made of an actor or agency by a trustor; trustworthiness focuses attention on the feature or qualities manifested by that actor/agency (or trustee). While conceptual distinctions between trust and trustworthiness are relatively straightforward, it is much less clear how to empirically validate these distinctions and whether they are identifiable in practice. Very few studies have attempted the task of measuring and distinguishing trust and trustworthiness in the political realm. As a result, we know little about the basis for citizens’ trust evaluations of political actors and institutions, and of whether these evaluations draw on distinctive appraisals of trustworthiness. This paper seeks to measure conditions of trust and trustworthiness, and to assess how appraisals of political actors’ trustworthiness relate to wider judgements of trust. The results – which obtain from a survey fielded on a sample of British citizens – provide a first step towards measuring, and identifying the relationship between, citizens’ judgements of trust and trustworthiness in the political realm.