Everything is political. Disentangling populists’ political trust

While initial research has often substitutes populist attitudes with political trust, recent advances suggest that political trust and populism are two distinct concepts (Geurkink, Zaslove, Sluiter, and Jacobs 2020). Based on these discussions I seek to understand which actors do populists individuals trust and distrust. More specifically, I distinguish partial and impartial forms of political trust (Zmerli 2017). The former captures trust in political actors such as parliament, government or political parties. In contrast, impartial trust refers to political trust in actors, which are supposed to be impartial, such as administrative bodies, the police. In principle, expert committees would similarly fall into this group. While the literature generally identifies a gap between those two forms of trust and suggests that citizens trust impartial actors more (Kulin and Johansson Sevä 2021), I argue that this gap should be substantially smaller for populist individuals. That is because the trust advantage of independent actors lies in their impartiality. However, populists do not perceive them to be impartial but rather party of the conspiring elite. I test these expectations with survey data. References: Geurkink, Bram, Andrej Zaslove, Roderick Sluiter, and Kristof Jacobs. 2020. “Populist Attitudes, Political Trust, and External Political Efficacy: Old Wine in New Bottles?” Political Studies 68(1): 247–267. Kulin, Joakim, and Ingemar Johansson Sevä. 2021. “Who do you trust? How trust in partial and impartial government institutions influences climate policy attitudes.” Climate Policy 21(1): 33–46. Zmerli, Sonja. 2017. “Objects of political and social trust: scales and hierarchies.” In Handbook on Political Trust, Edward Elgar Publishing, p. 104–124. http://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781782545101.00017.xml (Accessed February 7, 2022).