Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust? Assessing Measurement Equivalence in Diverse Regime Types.

ABSTRACT: Do standard "trust in government" survey questions deliver measures which are reliable and equivalent in meaning across diverse regime types? I test for the measurement equivalence of political trust in a sample of 35 former Soviet and European countries using the 2010 Life in Transition Survey II conducted by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Employing multiple group confirmatory factor analysis, I find that trust perceptions in central political institutions differ from (1) trust in regional and local political institutions, (2) trust in protective institutions like the armed forces and police and (3) trust in order institutions like the courts and police. Four measurement models achieve partial metric invariance and two reach partial scalar invariance

SUBMITTER: Schneider I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5579303 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature