Variability and Stability in Political Trust – A Latent State–Trait Analysis

Political trust has been investigated as (a) a stable disposition, and (b) a dynamic variable responsive to external events. As these perspectives lack a theoretical and methodological integration, we draw from personality research and adopt the traits-as-density-distribution-of-states (Fleeson, W. [2001]. Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80[6], 1011–1027) approach to conceptualize stability and variability in one theoretical framework. Further, we propose to use latent state–trait analysis (Steyer, R., & Schmitt, M. [1990]. The effects of aggregation across and within occasions on consistency, specificity and reliability. Methodika, 4, 58–94) to jointly estimate coefficients of stability and variability. We showcase the usefulness of this approach using German panel data (N = 2,083) across five years. Dispositional factors explained substantially more variance in political trust, than situational factors, revealing a ratio of roughly 3:1. We discuss how this ratio can serve as a comparative measure of stability for concepts of individual differences beyond political trust.