# Political Trust **Political trust** is citizens' confidence that government and political institutions will, on the whole, do what is right. Its long decline is one of the best-documented trends in American [[Public Opinion]], and its erosion is both a symptom and an accelerant of democratic trouble. ## Diffuse vs. specific support David Easton's distinction organizes the concept. **Specific support** is approval of particular officials or policies — it rises and falls with performance and is supposed to be conditional. **Diffuse support** is deeper, more durable loyalty to the *system itself* — the belief that institutions and the constitutional order are legitimate regardless of who currently holds power. Democracies can survive low specific support (throwing out the incumbents is how the system is meant to work); they are endangered when **diffuse** support erodes and citizens stop regarding the institutions, elections, and rules as legitimate at all. ## The long decline Trust in the federal government "to do what is right" stood near 75% in the early 1960s (American National Election Studies) and has spent most of the period since below 30%, with brief rally-around-the-flag spikes. The drivers are debated — Vietnam and Watergate, economic stagnation, rising inequality, [[Polarization]], and a media environment that rewards institutional cynicism (see [[Media Theory Hub]]). Trust is now also sharply **asymmetric and conditional on power**: partisans trust government far more when their own party holds it, so the measure increasingly tracks which team is in office rather than a stable civic baseline. ## Why it matters for backsliding Low diffuse trust is the solvent of [[Democratic Norms]]. Citizens who believe the system is already rigged or corrupt are more willing to accept a leader who promises to break it, to dismiss adverse election results as fraud, and to tolerate norm violations by their own side. Manufactured distrust — election-denial narratives, "deep state" framing, attacks on courts and the press — is therefore not incidental but a **strategy**: degrading diffuse support lowers the public's resistance to anti-democratic action. The flip side, captured by [[Legitimacy]] in the [[Sociology Hub]], is that authority ultimately rests on belief. ## KB Significance Political trust is the variable that connects [[Public Opinion]] to regime stability. The KB's recurring story — an information ecosystem that profits from and weaponizes institutional cynicism — is, in this vocabulary, a sustained assault on **diffuse support**. Distinguishing healthy specific distrust (throw the bums out) from corrosive diffuse distrust (the whole system is illegitimate) is what makes the concept useful rather than a generic lament about "polarization." ## See Also - [[Public Opinion]] — where trust is measured. - [[Democratic Norms]] · [[Legitimacy]] — what eroding trust undermines. - [[Polarization]] · [[Political Behavior]]