Political trust revisited: theoretical and empirical insights into political distrust and mistrust

There remains a lack of clarity about what low political trust precisely entails. Based on long-standing discussions, recent works have sought to verify the existence of distinct political trust attitudes, namely, trust, mistrust, and distrust. While insightful, multiple criticisms have emerged on the contributions to this literature. Notably, despite growing attention, a comprehensive overview of different trust attitudes and their empirical basis has yet to be fully established. This study seeks to provide a theoretical and empirical examination as to the distinctiveness and relatedness of political trust attitudes. Drawing on novel survey data with 12,000 respondents across 8 European countries, this article shows that it is insufficient to use measures of political trust to understand political distrust. Yet, results are less supportive of mistrust as a distinct concept. Importantly, this study indicates that traditional conceptualisations and operationalisations of trust do not cover the full range of trust attitudes of citizens.