Does Political Trust Matter? Examining Some of the Implications of Low Levels of Political Trust in Australia

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Notes

¹However, Citrin and Miller were talking about support for protest activity, not actual protest activity as this was not included in the surveys that they drew from and such questions were included in very few academic surveys at the time.

²To the extent that these levels of trust constitute a ‘crisis of trust’ in Australia is debatable (see Goot 2002; Leigh 2002). While arguments may continue around the extent of this problem that less than half of the population trust people in government to do the right thing should be a matter of concern.

³For example, Australia has a mean political trust score of 3.0 while the United States has a mean political trust score of 2.8.

⁴This also helps overcome problems of multi-collinearity between the scaled variables.

⁵Party identification (which has been found to be highly significant in other studies (Bean 2001; Papadakis 1999)) has not been added here because with a change in government in 2007 its effects could be spurious. For example, Bean (2001, 23) found no party differences in levels of trust in 1996 in the wake of a change of government.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Martin

Aaron Martin is an Associate Lecturer at the Australian National University (School of Politics and International Relations). He is grateful to the two anonymous referees for their very helpful suggestions.