political trust
Definition
Political trust refers to the confidence citizens have in their government and political institutions, encompassing evaluations of technical competence, ethical conduct, and perceived congruence with citizens' interests. It functions as an evaluative attitude held toward political actors and systems, and attitudes toward parties, politicians, and institutions tend to cluster into a relatively coherent construct. Research treats political trust as a cornerstone of democratic functioning, linking it to civic investment, voting likelihood, and ideological support for democracy, while its absence is associated with greater polarization, populism, and extremism. A complementary body of research frames political distrust as one dimension of broader political alienation, alongside powerlessness and dissatisfaction, and longitudinal panel data from Swedish adolescents show that within-person increases in political distrust are concurrently associated with increases in radical political behavior, with distrust explaining the largest share of variance among the alienation components.
Related Terms
- longitudinal (1 shared article)
- elections (1 shared article)
- collective action (1 shared article)
- adolescence (1 shared article)
- radical political behavior (1 shared article)
- radicalism (1 shared article)
- radicalization (1 shared article)
- political alienation (1 shared article)
- political powerlessness (1 shared article)
- political dissatisfaction (1 shared article)
Applications
Political Trust and Collective Action
Engagement in election-related collective action moderates how electoral outcomes shape political trust. Among participants in the 2024 UK General Election who had invested heavily in collective action but whose local candidate lost, the general post-election increase in political trust was absent, suggesting that unsuccessful collective action undermines the perception that the political system is responsive to citizen input. This interaction was sensitive to measurement approach, appearing with a continuous Rasch engagement score but not with a binary participation measure.
Sources: Marinthe et al. (2026)
Political Trust and Electoral Outcomes
Electoral outcomes produce asymmetric shifts in political trust depending on whether voters supported the winning or losing party. In the 2024 UK General Election, trust rose significantly among Labour voters after the result but increased only weakly among supporters of losing parties, and before the vote the two groups did not differ statistically significantly. Local contest results compounded this pattern, with greater trust gains observed when a voter's preferred local candidate was elected as Member of Parliament.
Sources: Marinthe et al. (2026)
Political Trust and Political Radicalism
Political distrust is one of three components of political alienation theorized to increase the appeal of radical political behavior. Five-wave longitudinal data from Swedish adolescents aged 13 to 17 show that both between-person differences in average distrust and within-person fluctuations in distrust correspond to parallel differences and fluctuations in radical political behavior. The effect of distrust on radicalism was stronger for boys than for girls, indicating that gender moderates the pathway from institutional distrust to non-normative political action.
Sources: Miklikowska & Besta (2026)
