Policy area satisfaction, perceptions of responsibility, and political trust: a novel application of the REWB model to testing evaluation-based political trust

Abstract

Existing research demonstrates that evaluations of policies affect political trust. However, two limitations to the extant literature require us to reassess the micro-level foundation of the dominant trust-as-evaluation approach. Empirically, the common test of the evaluation-trust link relies on comparisons between individuals, an approach that suffers from endogeneity problems. Theoretically, the evaluation-trust link should be conditional on perceptions of government responsibility. Yet, this moderator is not included in most studies. We address these limitations in tandem. We study the conditionality of the evaluation-trust link on perceptions of government responsibility, using an innovative application of the Random Effects Within-Between (REWB) model, which simultaneously analyses variation between and within respondents. While our findings provide specific support for the (conditional) evaluation-trust link, we conclude that the literature has been overly optimistic when relying on between-respondent analyses.