This paper explores the impact of political trust on citizens’ opposition to government anti-terrorism police powers in Australia and five other nations with different levels of trust. Survey data is used to examine the patterns of opposition to unlimited detention, random stop-and-searches, and telephone wiretap surveillance. While trust in government represents a powerful constraint on citizens’ perceptions in nations with low levels of trust, such as Russia and Taiwan, it plays almost no role in high trust nations such as Australia. Overall, these differential patterns point to a reciprocal linkage between political trust and governmental policy, and remind us that the War on Terror’s expansion of police powers confronts citizenry in different nations who hold distinctive attitudes about the desirability of vesting greater discretionary power in government
