Attachment Style and Political Trust

• In Event: Trust & Politics

Abstract

Attachment Theory holds that our mental constructs of and tendencies towards social and institutional trust originate in early childhood in response to caregiver attentiveness and stability. I extend current research on attachment and test its impact on trust in government. Using original datasets, I find a strong relationship, almost equivalent to the effect size of partisanship, between attachment “styles,” or patterns of attachment behavior, and political trust. Attachment style similarly conditions what tasks citizens trust the government to complete effectively. Therefore, attachment style is a highly consequential predicting variable, and suggests interventions geared towards increasing trust begin much earlier than previously expected—generations earlier.

Author

• Amy Funck, Rutgers University, New Brunswick