Polarized Trust in Political and Non-Political Settings

• In Event: Affective Polarization in the US

Abstract

Contemporary American politics is replete with division. At the elite level, members of Congress increasingly divide along partisan lines in their policy positions (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Theriault 2008). At the mass level, some point to increased ideological consistency in citizens’ issue preferences as evidence that the mass public has become more ideologically polarized (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008). Others interpret increased ideological consistency as evidence of greater party sorting rather than greater extremity or polarization (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2011). Although the question of ideological or policy-based polarization in the mass public remains disputed, evidence of affective polarization in the mass public is mounting. Republicans and Democrats, it seems, increasingly dislike each other.

Researchers report that political trust has polarized along partisan lines. Republicans are much less likely to trust government when Democrats are in power while Democrats distrust government when Republicans are in charge (Hetherington and Rudolph 2015). Similarly, citizens’ perceptions of candidates’ traits have polarized along partisan lines (Hetherington, Long, and Rudolph 2016). That affective polarization exists within political settings is not particularly surprising given current levels of polarization among political elites. What is surprising, though, are findings that partisanship triggers affective polarization even in the case of non-political judgments and behaviors. Partisan cues, for example, create polarization in attitudes about inter-party marriages (Iyengar, Lelkes, and Sood 2012), the awarding of college scholarships (Iyengar and Westwood 2015), the evaluation of job applicants (Gift and Gift 2015), and even dating behavior (Huber and Malhotra 2017).

Although the literature provides evidence of affective polarization in political and non-political settings, it rarely does so within the same study, making it difficult to assess the relative magnitude of affective polarization across different contexts. Using a carefully crafted survey experiment, this paper examines the degree of polarized trust across a variety of political and non-political domains. The experiment features a between-subjects design with subjects randomly assigned to one of three conditions. We manipulated the partisan identity of the trust object so that subjects made trust judgments about a set of in-party actors, out-party actors, or actors of unknown partisanship. We assessed trust in non-political settings by measuring subjects’ trust in the behavior of non-political actors such as parents, professors, business owners, and lawyers. We assessed trust in political settings by measuring subjects’ trust in the behavior of political actors such as members of Congress, judges, protesters, and interest groups. Preliminary analysis finds pervasive evidence of polarized trust across both political and non-political settings. Although the magnitude of polarized trust in political settings is larger than that of polarized trust in non-political settings, the magnitude of the latter is substantively significant. The results contribute novel insights to our understanding of affective polarization.

Authors

• Thomas J. Rudolph, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Marc J. Hetherington, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill