Priming political trust: Evidence from an experiment

Political trust is one of the most researched areas in political science. Yet little is known about what causes political trust to vary. Past research has relied almost solely on survey data, and focused on exploring the correlation between political trust and various micro- and macro-level factors. This research note reports the findings from an experiment designed to examine the causal effect of one of the most commonly cited causes of political trust: political probity. Results show that political trust and trust in specific institutions change when participants read an article about political probity and complete a word-association task. The treatment we used is low cost, straightforward and may be used by other researchers to alter political trust in experiments.