General Political Trust and Involvement – Their Structure and Nature from a Personality Perspective // Doctoral Thesis Dr. Laurits Bromme
Are there stable individual differences in political trust in and involvement with politics? Are these differences linked to personality structure?
Individual differences in general attitudes towards politics (political trust, political self-efficacy, political interest, willingness to participate, etc.) play a special role for democracy and have long been studied. A wide variety of constructs exists to describe these individual differences. This dissertation examines their underlying dimensional structure and proposes two higher-order dimensions – general political trust and general political involvement – understood as basic tendencies of thinking and feeling towards politics. In three journal articles, the dissertation examines the stability, generalisability and personality correlates of these higher-order tendencies.