The Relationship between Trust, Interest, and Efficacy: An Experimental Test

• In Event: Public Attitudes and Confidence in Democracy

Abstract

Interest in politics is a key predictor of a host of important political attitudes and behaviors. There is, however, surprisingly little work that explores the causes of political interest. We argue that interest can be thought of as an indicator of the extent to which people feel the government needs to be monitored; when the electorate trusts the government more, there is less of a need to follow what it is doing. In our recent article (Peterson et al. 2022), we demonstrate that at the macro level Americans’ interest in politics has an inverse relationship with macro levels of trust in government. In this paper, we build on a pilot study we presented last year to explore the microfoundations of the macro relationship. Through an analysis of two studies in which we experimentally manipulate trust, we test pre-registered hypotheses about the causal relationship between trust and interest and engagement (Krupnikov and Ryan, 2022), as well as the moderating role of external efficacy. We discuss the implications of our results for democratic health.

Authors

• Joanne Miller, University of Delaware

• David A. M. Peterson, Iowa State University