Political Trust and Its Determinants : Exploring the role of cultural and institutional related determinants of political trust in Sweden

There is a current widespread knowledge about what factors that is of importance when explaining levels of individuals political trust. Unfortunately, the same knowledge is not at hand as to whether these ‘determinants’ of political have changed over time and if so how? In other words, can we assume that citizens form their trust in similar matters over time or has there been a shift? With the purpose of contributing to new knowledge about political trust, this thesis mainly explored if there has been a change in the effects of often argued to be strong determinants on political trust and secondly if there are any trends as to how these effects has changed over time. In order to realize answers to these most likely never posed questions, the theoretical framework departed from Mishler and Rose’s sectioning of cultural and institutional theory which entail very different views on the origin and dynamic of political trust. Later the two theories were operationalized into cultural and institutional related variables in accordance to available variables found in “The SOM Institute Cumulative Dataset 1986-2019”. Through numerous multiple linear regression analyses utilizing Swedish data between 1998 and 2019 it shows that the effect of most explanatory variables on political trust changes, but since these effects were small from the start there are reasons to question what weight the changes are carrying. Onwards, by performing interaction analyses the thesis was able to conclude a handful of positive and negative linear trends arching over the 22-year period meaning that some explanatory variables have become increasingly and decreasingly important when explaining the variation in political trust, which in turn indicates that the Swedish population on average tends to form their trust slightly different in 2019 as opposed to in 1998.