Intergenerational Transmission of Political Trust and Inequality Perceptions

Political trust is often treated as an individual evaluative orientation, yet it also functions as a cognitive heuristic shaping how citizens perceive social inequality and evaluate redistributive policies. Such heuristics are learned and reinforced in social contexts, most notably within families. Despite extensive research on political socialization and social influence, little is known about how political trust is transmitted across generations, how this process varies by family characteristics, and how transmitted trust shapes inequality perceptions. This study examines the intergenerational transmission of political trust and its consequences for inequality perceptions using novel dyadic survey data from Finland (N = 1,980 parent–offspring pairs; offspring born 1982–2006). Employing multilevel linear regression models and family-level variance decomposition, we show that approximately one-fifth of the variation in political trust is attributable to family-level clustering. Intergenerational alignment in trust is stronger when parents and offspring share similar socioeconomic positions and political ideologies, whereas disparities within families weaken the transmission of trust. Crucially, we find that transmitted political trust—both low and high—is a stronger predictor of offspring’s inequality perceptions than contemporaneous evaluative trust alone. This suggests that political trust acquired through familial socialization has distinct and enduring implications for how individuals interpret social inequality. The findings conceptualize political trust as a socially embedded heuristic that is simultaneously cognitive, relational, and stratified. By linking family socialization processes to inequality perceptions, the study advances political psychological and sociological theories on the origins, persistence, and social conditioning of political trust across the life course.