Democracy requires both citizens’ trust in politics and their skepticism. Scholars warned against the likely detrimental effects of blind trust and blind distrust. The former would make citizens susceptible to manipulation, the latter to alienation. By contrast, (dis)trust that is not blind but evaluative stimulates vigilant civic engagement. While blind (dis)trust would lead to an anomic democracy, evaluative (dis)trust would stimulate democratic reinvigoration and accountability.
Yet, while scholars have widely acknowledged this paradox, political trust research struggled to integrate skepticism conceptually, theoretically, in measurement, and in empirical analyses. Instead, most political trust research focuses exclusively on levels of political (dis)trust. This one-dimensional approach made it very difficult to answer central questions to the field, to operationalize political trust in full, to interpret descriptive trends in political trust and to offer a sound diagnosis of the causes, consequences, and risk of low or declining trust.
CRITICALTRUST addresses this vast lacuna. It first develops a novel, two-dimensional model of political (dis)trust. Second, this model will be the foundation for empirical analyses at the micro-level (citizens; via survey and experimental data), meso-level (social groups and local environments via registry data), and macro-level (via aggregated data and country-level measures). Third, the project will develop new measures that distinguish dispositional from relational (dis)trust at the individual level for primary data collection, and develop techniques to distinguish between them in secondary analyses and the individual and macro-level. Primary data collection takes place across three-waves in a cross-national panel survey in 8 European countries: Estonia, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Both the survey’s panel element and the survey experiments embedded in them allow a systematic test causal effects that have long been argued for in the literature.
The outcomes of these analyses will offer diagnoses, not only of the risks of low and declining trust but also of the risks of blind trust and distrust. This will support advice to democratic actors whether and how to stimulate political trust.
