Comment: The Political Relevance of Trust in Government

American Political Science Review

Volumn 68, Issue 3, 1974, Pages 973-988

  Citrin, Jack ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84976155584     PISSN: 00030554     EISSN: 15375943     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1959141     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Other studies that support the conclusion that political factors such as ideological orientations, evaluations of the performance of governmental institutions, and responses to personal contacts with political authorities are important causes of political disaffection are Joel Aberbach and Jack Walker, “Political Trust and Racial Ideology,” American Political Science Review, 64, (December, 1970), 1199–1219, Edward N. Muller, “The Role of Political Distrust in a Theory of Support and Opposition to the Regime,” unpublished paper delivered at the Madison, Wisconsin Conference on Public Support for the Political System, Aug. 13–17, 1973, Jack Citrin, “Political Disaffection in America: 1958-68” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Jan., 1972); and Jack Citrin, Herbert McClosky, J. Merrill Shanks, and Paul M. Sniderman, “Personal and Political Sources of Political Alienation,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 4 (September, 1974).
2. On this point see Citrin “Political Disaffection in America,” chap. 4, and Arthur Miller, Thad Brown, and Alden Raine, “Social Conflict and Political Estrangement,” unpublished paper delivered at the 1973 annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association.
3. For example, in 1964, the association between personal trust and political trust was.21 (tau-b); in 1968 it was.20 (tau-b). Aberbach and Walker report a relationship of.16 (gamma) for their Detroit sample.
4. Throughout this paper I use the terms political authorities, regime, and community in the sense of David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1965). In addition, I use the term political system as a synonym of regime.
5. These figures are computed from the marginal distributions provided in the ICPR 1972 Election Study Codebook. “No answer” responses are omitted from the total base. The last two questions are restricted variables made available by J. Merrill Shanks.
6. See the extended discussion of this point in Citrin et al., “Personal and Political Sources of Political Alienation.”
7. Unless explicitly noted, all the tables reported and all figures in the text derive from my own analysis of the 1964, 1968, 1970, and 1972 election study data made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research. My scoring of the Trust in Government scale employs the same item dichotomies as Miller does, although our handling of missing data varies slightly and I construct scale scores by simply summing responses rather than using a formal Guttman scoring procedure.
8. This conclusion has disturbing implications for analysts of time-series data. Again the appropriate safeguards lie in conceiving of the construct validation process as a continuous one.
9. “Quoted in Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York, McGraw Hill, 1958), p. 187.
10. See David Schwartz, Political Alienation and Political Behavior (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. 1973), ch. 8, for a good summary of the problems in “modeling” the attitude-behavior linkage. The concept of a “behavioral orientation” is similar to Rokeach's concept of “attitude toward the situation.” See Milton Rokeach, Beliefs, Attitudes and Values (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1970).
11. Edward N. Muller, “A Partial Test of a Theory of Potential for Political Violence”, American Political Science Review, 66 (September, 1972), 928–959.
12. Schwartz, chaps. 9, 10.
13. David O. Sears and John Maconahay, The Politics of Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 14Jeffery. Paige, “Political Orientation and Riot Participation”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 36, (1971), 810–820.
14. Jack Citrin, Herbert McClosky, J. Merrill Shanks, and Paul M. Sniderman, “Sources and Consequences of Political Alienation: A Preliminary Report on Indicator Development,” unpublished paper delivered at the Madison, Wisconsin, Conference on Public Support for the Political System, August 13–17, 1973.
15. See, for example, the conflict between Paige's study of Newark rioters and the report on the Watts riot in H. Edward Ransford, “Isolation Powerlessness and Violence: A Study of Attitudes and Participation in the Watts Riot”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 73 (1968), 581–591.
16. See the argument made by Martin Fishbein, “Attitude and the Prediction of Behavior,” in Readings in Attitude Theory and Measurement, ed. Martin Fishbein (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1967).
17. The exception is Muller, who finds that relative deprivation has a weak influence on the potential for political violence and that this influence is entirely dependent on whether such feelings of deprivation are associated with political mistrust. Muller's measure of relative deprivation, however, does not include the element of politicization that is subsumed by the concept of policy dissatisfaction.
18. The exact working of these questions can be found in the ICPR codebook of the CPS 1970 National Election Study, pp. 83–84.
19. Muller, “A Partial Test of a Theory.”, p. 934.
20. The measure of policy dissatisfaction for both 1970 and 1972 refers to the mean distance between a respondent's issue position and the position he attributes to the Republican party on the following eight issues: Vietnam, health insurance, inflation, urban violence, crime control, campus protests, and pollution. See Miller, this issue of the Review. The figures concerning the relationships between policy dissatisfaction and approval of political dissent are not included, but in every case these are significant at at least the.01 level.
21. See Citrin, “Political Disaffection in America,” chap. 6, for a detailed report on the connections between diverse orientations toward the political system and political participation.
22. For the distinction between “position” and “valence” issues, see Donald E. Stokes, “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” American Political Science Review, 60 (March, 1966), pp. 19–38.