The Role of (Mis)Perceptions of Others’ Institutional Trust in Partisan Group Identity Formation

The decline of institutional trust in the United States is a concerning trend that will frustrate collective action if not reversed. In this study, the authors build on scholarship on political polarization, in-group identity, and third-order beliefs (i.e. beliefs about others’ beliefs) to propose that partisans will perceive that the general public will have less trust in the institutions they themselves trust.

The authors test the authors’ argument by collecting a survey of Republicans and Democrats where the authors measure their trust in US institutions and their perceptions of the general public’s trust in those institutions. The authors then compare these measures to those in the 2021 General Social Survey (GSS).

The authors find that Democrats have greater trust in Knowledge institutions than Republicans and perceive the general public to have lower trust than they do in these institutions, while Republicans have greater trust in Traditional institutions and perceive the general public to have lower trust than they do in these institutions. The authors find that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of the general public’s trust in their own trusted institutions is lower than established levels in the GSS.

The authors argue that perceptions of the beliefs and values of one’s in-group being out-of-step with wider society is an important aspect of in-group identity. The author measure both participants’ first-order institutional trust and their perceptions of the general public’s institutional trust in the same sample, permitting analyses that uncover differences between the two and between political partisans.