Trust in Crisis? Explaining the Disconnect Between Perceived and Actual Political Trust Trends

The image of an ongoing “crisis of political trust” has been widespread for decades, despite longitudinal studies showing that political trust remains relatively stable over time. This study shifts the focus of the crisis debate from actual trends in political trust to perceptions of these trends. We examine which macro and micro-level factors contribute to citizens' egotropic and sociotropic perceptions of declining political trust. Specifically, we measure and explain the perception of a decline by comparing the longitudinal changes in political trust with citizens’ retrospective perceptions of political trust. Our study leverages longitudinal and experimental data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel, which allows us to investigate trust incongruencies over a time span of 15 years. At the macro-level, we leverage the survey experiment to test whether the length of retrospection (e.g., one year vs one decade) and contextual political information (e.g., governmental composition, or political events such as successes and scandals) influence perceptions of declining trust. At the micro-level, we investigate to what extent individual traits, such as neuroticism or political sophistication, account for trust incongruencies and whether they moderate the macro-level effects of temporal and political context. By disentangling perceptions of declining political trust from actual trends, this study sheds light on the psychological and contextual factors fuelling the impression of an ongoing trust crisis.