Political trust has become a core concept in recent empirical research of mass political attitudes, and a critical indicator for success and failure of politicians in the media and public debate. However, our measurements of political trust are (almost always) very basic: How much do you trust … politicians in X, parliament, government? With possibilities to answer from tend to trust/tend not to trust, to some value from low to high trust. What do these answers mean? In the Dutch Citizens’ Outlooks Barometer (COB) we have asked ourselves this question continuously since its start in 2008. We have discussed the meaning of political trust in focus groups and with various questions we have asked the respondents of our surveys to explain their scores and to give reasons for trust and distrust. After a review a of literature on measuring trust and confidence, I will use this qualitative material as well as statistical analyses of the relationships between indicators of trust and other general social and political attitudes in COB 2008-2011 to give a critical account of our measurements and to sketch different meanings for subgroups in the population. The paper will finish with some reflections on possible implications of making trust findings public and if and how we as political scientist should take these implications into account.
