POLITICAL REALITIES AND POLITICAL TRUST: Descriptive Representation in Municipal Government

The gap between the political trust levels of Anglo and African-American citizens represents one of the most clearly established characteristics of American political attitudes. The “political reality ” (or “political empowerment”) model has been used to explain this pattern. While empirical tests generally support the political reality model, few actually allow for much variation in the political reality facing citizens. The analysis presented here extends previous research on the political reality model and focuses on the ways in which collective descriptive representation differentially affects feelings of trust among Anglos and African-Americans. The results of this study suggest that while higher levels of African-American representation have important positive effects for African-American citizens and some negative impacts for Anglo citizens, political representation levels on par with minority proportions of the general population as a whole do not seem to boost feelings of political trust among the African-American community