Finding the public in public trust: A bottom-up study of trust in politicians and government agencies

In this study we undertake a novel, bottom-up approach to the measurement and study of public trust. Reflecting recent calls for trust research to ‘pay greater attention to the way trust is expressed by individuals’ (Syed 2024: 7), we conducted telephone interviews of a representative sample of 1200 Australians, qualitatively measuring what trust means to them, and their reasons for trusting politicians and government agencies. Through our analysis of their responses, we make three important contributions to the public trust literature. First, allowing respondents to express trust in their own words highlights a richer array of drivers of trust than is often presented in public trust research. Second, we reveal systematic differences in the way respondents evaluate the trustworthiness of different public trust objects (politicians compared to government agencies), underscoring the need for greater nuance in the way public trust is conceptualised. Third, we use the first two insights to examine opportunities to refine the measurement of public trust to better reflect the intricacies of the way citizens think about political actors.