Shared Concerns, Divided Views: Measuring Partisan Perceptions of Social and Institutional Trust in the U.S.

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Partisan Politics

Abstract

The decline of community and social capital has been a central concern in the social sciences and in the general public for decades. But this nearly universal concern, which spans political ideologies and parties, has obfuscated deeper research in how political division, one of the major paradigms of studies of social division more generally, has affected cultural perspectives of declines in social trust. In this study, we address this gap by examining partisan perceptions of declining social trust and how these perceptions are related to individual levels of social and institutional trust themselves. Our findings indicate that 1) Republicans and Democrats do indeed use divergent cultural frames regarding declining social trust (i.e. what we call Charismatic Moral Decline and Rational-Scientific Pessimism framings respectively), 2) these framings constitute unique relationships among Republicans and Democrats concerning their own levels of social trust, and 3) these framings also characterize politically unique relationships with self-reported institutional trust. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social trust, institutional trust, and political division.

Authors

• Marcus Mann, Purdue University

• Joshua Franklin Doyle, Purdue University

• Lauren Jae Knudson, Indiana University-Bloomington