Group discrimination and personal experiences: how racialized identities shape political trust

In times of crisis, the relationship between personal experiences, discrimination, and political trust has complex dynamics across racialized groups. Drawing on a large-scale survey of British respondents during the pandemic, this study examines how adverse personal experiences and awareness of group discrimination shape trust in political institutions. Previous work suggests that perceptions of discriminatory group treatment can have a profound impact on trust, but also that some groups resist acknowledging discrimination toward their in-group as a coping mechanism. We find that while white respondents were less likely to be directly affected by the crisis, they were more prone to acknowledge that marginalized communities bore disproportionate hardship. In contrast, minoritized respondents maintained relatively high levels of trust despite more adverse experiences. For them, heightened perceptions of group discrimination, but not personal experiences, were linked to decreased trust. Our findings challenge the assumption that adverse circumstances uniformly erode political trust. Instead, our results underscore the role of discrimination perceptions in conditioning the relationship between experiences and trust. By highlighting how crisis experiences and the recognition of inequality influence trust variably, we contribute to the political trust literature by demonstrating the role perceptions of discrimination play in linking racialized identities to political trust.