Improving the Measurement of Political Trust: Assessing     Dimensionality and External Validity
{'Code': '04050200', 'Directorate': {'Abbreviation': 'SBE', 'LongName': 'Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie'}, 'Division': {'Abbreviation': 'SES', 'LongName': 'Divn Of Social and Economic Sciences'}}
{'SignBlockName': 'Frank P. Scioli  Jr.', 'PO_EMAI': None, 'PO_PHON': None}
Declining trust in politicians and political institutions is one of the         clearest trends in American public opinion.  Confidence in religious,           educational and other institutions has also waned, but emphasis has             focused on political trust, both because it may summarize a wide range          of diffuse grievances and because it might indicate increased potential         for disruptive action, political violence and instability.  In spite of         investigations by numerous scholars in collecting longitudinal data on          political trust over nearly three decades, there are serious doubts             about the contribution of the concept to explaining political change.           It is not clear what is measured by available indicators, and only weak         and inconsistent evidence links expressed political trust with other            political attitudes or with behavior.  Research to date gives little            guidance into whether the fault lies with theories about political              trust or with current indicators.  The goal of this research is to              evaluate available longitudinal data, from the National Election                Studies and other national surveys, against several validity criteria,          and to derive proposals for selectively deleting and improving the              items that comprise this core component of the National Election                Studies time series.                                                                                                                                            Criteria for construct validation include the relationships between             political trust and : a) other aspects of the global concept of                 political alienation; b) representation, and especially the notions of          fairness and efficiency intrinsic to procedures for holding governments         publicly accountable; c) policy implementation, especially politicians          claims that a few policy failures can initiate a "spiral of distrust,"          with citizens refusing to comply with new policies.  Each criterion is          specified as a distinctive covariance structure model or family of              models, and parameter estimates will allow quantitative judgments of            relative validity.                                                                                                                                              Potential contributions of the research are three-fold.  First, it will         foster better-informed decisions about continuing or modifying data             collection on political trust.  Second, because the concept of                  political trust is imbedded in theories about alienation and political          legitimacy, construct validation with multiple measures of multiple             concepts are not well developed, and this research will provide an              arena for formulating and testing procedures that adapt classical               inference criteria to covariance structure analysis.
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{'Name': 'University of California-Santa Barbara', 'CityName': 'SANTA BARBARA', 'ZipCode': '931060001', 'PhoneNumber': '8058934188', 'StreetAddress': '3227 CHEADLE HALL', 'StreetAddress2': None, 'CountryName': 'United States', 'StateName': 'California', 'StateCode': 'CA', 'CONGRESSDISTRICT': '24', 'CONGRESS_DISTRICT_ORG': 'CA24', 'ORG_UEI_NUM': 'G9QBQDH39DF4', 'ORG_LGL_BUS_NAME': 'UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA', 'ORG_PRNT_UEI_NUM': None}
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{'Code': '137100', 'Text': 'Political Science'}
{'url': 'https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/download?DownloadFileName=1987&All=true', 'xml': '8721071.xml'}