Trust, social movements, and the state

A large literature has developed around the concept of political trust, but what exactly political trust is remains ambiguous. Some studies present it as a narrower evaluation of the current government’s performance, while others treat it as a broader orientation towards the entire political system. This paper speaks to this question by examining the relationship between political trust and people’s views of two social movements: the environmental and women’s movements. If political trust is a narrower evaluation, then people who are critical of the state should be more positive towards actors challenging the state to perform better, and political trust should correlate negatively with trust in social movements. If political trust is a broader orientation, then trust should encompass all actors in the political system, which includes social movements, and views of different actors should correlate positively. Using data from multiple waves of the World Values Surveys, we find the latter view to be correct, and in three ways: across individuals within given societies, across societies, and over time within societies. We conclude that attitudes towards social movements reflect individuals’ broader orientations towards the political system, and that this broader orientation is what we should understand political trust to be.