How Trust Matters: The Changing Political Relevance of Political Trust.

When people trust the government, they are more likely to support its policies, especially those that require sacrifice (Hetherington 2005). However, "the government" is a complex and amorphous set of institutions. Depending upon what parts of the government become salient, the public's understanding of the nature and functions of it changes. Following the New Deal and the Great Society, people most often thought of government in terms of its ability to deal with race and welfare policy policies. We find, however, that the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Bush administration's response ushered in a new era in which people began to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. As a consequence, we witness a change in how trust matters. Political trust ceased to affect attitudes about redistribution and race-targeted programs and started to affect foreign policy preferences. Our analysis of the 2000-2004 ANES Panel Study and the 2004 ANES Time Series Study shows this change transformed political trust from a reservoir of support for programs that serves the least well off to a factor leading people to favor interventionist and hawkish foreign policy. These results contribute to a somewhat new understanding of political trust. Specifically, the policy domains that become salient determine which policy preferences political trust affects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]