PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Political Science

For over fifty years the American National Election Studies (ANES) program has been measuring citizens' evaluations of the trustworthiness of the “government in Washington.” The longitudinal dynamic of political trust attitude, suggests that in the last fifty years, Americans have generally become less positive and more critical towards the national government. This dissertation empirically explores the causes and consequences of changes in the level and components of political trust attitude over time. This research challenges the prevalent idea that public trust in government shifts in response to the changes in government performance. Building on the scholarship of cognitively oriented public opinion scholars, I instead advocate the view that people judge about the trustworthiness of the “government in Washington” based on the problems they consider important at any given point in time—a process defined as cognitive priming. The change in political trust is modeled using the ANES cross-sectional time-series (1964-2000) dataset augmented by the context level data, replicating the state of the national- and media agendas at the time of survey response. These contextual data include the macro-level measures of unemployment, inflation, consumer confidence, and the measures of media attention to the national economy and defense. Results from the multilevel structural equation models (SEM) with Bayesian MCMC estimation method suggest that issue priming plays a key role in the longitudinal dynamic of trust. First, I establish that priming occurs through the change in respondents' national importance judgments and economic evaluations. These mediators significantly carry the priming effect of mass media and real-world cues on political trust. Second, I demonstrate that change in the volume of media attention to economic and international affairs and national defense issue domains increases the weight people place on these issues when making judgments about the trustw (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephen Mockabee PhD (Committee Chair); Marc Hetherington PhD (Committee Member); Patrick Miller PhD (Committee Member); Barbara Bardes PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science