Trust and Involvement as Higher‐Order Factors of General Attitudes Towards Politics. Testing a Structural Model Across 26 Democracies

Abstract

Interindividual differences in how people think and feel about politics have been investigated for decades. However, the great number of attitudinal concepts that has been developed to describe these differences is likely to distract from their conceptual overlap and dimensional structure. In addition, not much is known about the cross‐cultural invariance of their interrelation. We propose that attitudes towards politics can be structured by two broad higher‐order factors, a factor of general political involvement and a factor of general political trust. In two studies (N1 = 767; N2 = 29,018), including representative samples from 26 democracies, we first conduct several confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) to show that the higher‐order model is a well‐fitting and parsimonious alternative to a baseline model without higher‐order factors in most samples. Second, we present evidence from multigroup CFA that the overall patterns of factor loadings are the same across all 26 countries. We interpret this structural equivalence across different democracies as support for the assumption that general political involvement and general political trust reflect basic orientations towards politics that are based on (1) demands of democratic political systems and (2) universal principles in human trait structure.

Mapping political trust and involvement in the personality space—A meta‐analysis and new evidence

“…For all models, we used a preregistered CFA model to jointly estimate general political trust and involvement as higher-order factors above their respective lower-order components 5 (see osf.io/mrvnu). The joint model allows both factors to correlate, in line with findings of a positive correlation in a large number of countries (Bromme & Rothmund, 2021). Further, we had preregistered to estimate correlations with the Big Five by extracting latent factors based on exploratory factor analysis.…”

“…In addition, existing studies have mostly neglected the hierarchical organization of personality traits (but see Foschi & Lauriola, 2014; Gerber et al., 2011b) and political trust and involvement (cf. Bromme & Rothmund, 2021). The present article thus aims to integrate previous findings by meta‐analytical means, and to further our understanding of the relations at different levels of abstraction.…”

“…Individual differences in political attitudes can be roughly categorized into ideological issue preferences (e.g., Jost et al, 2009) and what might be called general attitudes toward politics (Bromme & Rothmund, 2021). The latter reflect individual differences in how people generally think and feel about politics (which are often investigated within the political culture framework; Almond & Verba, 1989/1963).…”

“…In a recent paper, we have proposed that both domains are organized hierarchically, with higher‐order factors subsuming more specific attitudes (Bromme & Rothmund, 2021; see also Marien, 2011; Weatherford, 1991). Various concepts have been proposed that describe individual differences in political trust, such as trust in politicians 2 (Halmburger, Baumert, et al, 2019), trust in political institutions (Marien, 2011), and trust in the political system (Halmburger, Baumert, et al, 2019).…”

“…Our primary goal was to systematically review research on the empirical relation between the Big Five personality traits and attitudes toward politics. We focused especially on attitudes toward politics that have been linked to higher‐order factors, namely political trust and political involvement (Bromme & Rothmund, 2021). To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review and meta‐analyses (Study 1).…”