Political Trust as an Evaluation against Normative Benchmarks? A Two-wave Survey Experiment on the Role of Normative Benchmarks in the Evaluative Model of Political Trust

The dominant model that guides scholarly research on political trust rests on the assumption that this attitude is evaluative. It states that citizens evaluate political actors’ trustworthiness traits against a set of normative benchmarks. Remarkably, despite its dominance in political trust research and its serious implications for theories on democratic accountability, this assumption has not been tested systematically. This paper tests the micro-level foundations of the trust-as-evaluation model via an extensive two-wave survey experiment among 15,997 respondents. We assess to what extent normative benchmarks of trustworthiness condition citizens’ trust in politicians with 11 randomized traits. Our findings challenge the commonly held view of the role of normative benchmarks in the trust-as-evaluation model. While respondents clearly differentiate trustworthy politicians from untrustworthy ones and withdraw trust from politicians with negative traits, their normative benchmarks do not systematically influence this judgment. We discuss the implications of these findings for the trust-as-evaluation model.