Revisiting the Link Between Political Trust and Political Participation

Abstract

Political trust is typically seen as a cause of political participation, and thus, declining levels of trust in politicians and institutions are often blamed for political disengagement. By revisiting the formation of political trust, we argue that this blame may be misplaced. We show that the correlation between political trust and participation is largely explained by heritable predispositions that make some people simultaneously more likely to trust political authorities and to participate in politics. Using variance decomposition models and co-twin control designs with data from three twin studies from the United States, Sweden, and Australia, we demonstrate that trust is moderately heritable and that previous estimates of the association between trust and participation are overstated. This result is robust to multiple operationalizations and specifications. We conclude that political trust may be less likely to affect political behavior than previously thought.