The Microfoundations of Political Trustworthiness

Why do citizens trust some political actors and institutions but not others? Existing research often relies on single-item measures of trust with a top-down design, obscuring the underlying criteria citizens use to evaluate political authority. This paper reconstructs the microfoundations of political trustworthiness by analysing a large-scale survey conducted in Australia that measures citizens’ reasons for trusting and distrusting both politicians and government agencies. Using a comprehensive battery of 26 trustworthiness attributes from 7 subdimensions, we identify distinct latent dimensions of trust, including moral integrity, procedural fairness, competence, accountability, and relational responsiveness. We then compare the structure and salience of these dimensions across political actors and institutions, and between trust and distrust evaluations. Employing factor analysis and measurement invariance tests, the paper shows that trust is not simply the inverse of distrust and that citizens apply systematically different evaluative standards to politicians and bureaucratic institutions. These findings contribute to debates on political trust, democratic legitimacy, and representation by demonstrating that trustworthiness is multidimensional and context-dependent. The paper offers a framework for moving beyond generic trust measures toward a more fine-grained understanding of how citizens judge political authority in contemporary democracies.