Keywords: Youth, Political Trust, Iraq

The fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 led to a completely new political system in Iraq. The political system has faced several major challenges from ISIS to foreign meddling, to significant protest movements against the post-Saddam ruling classes. This research seeks to answer the following question: why do older and younger Iraqis diverge on the issue of trust in their political institutions? Using data from the Iraq Opinion Thermometer (IOT) from 2020-2024, it is clear that younger Iraqis, mostly Shia, are much more distrustful of their political institutions than older Iraqis. We hypothesize that this is due to older Shia Iraqis being more risk averse than younger Iraqis because of their fear of a return to the “tumultuous past.” While older citizens across the world tend to be more change-averse than younger citizens because older people, on average, feel less in control of their fate compared to younger people, we show that in Iraq this pattern is even more pronounced because of the decades of tumult older Iraqis experienced in the post-2003 era. Secondarily, we argue that experience with ISIS will temper the age effect among Iraqis. Sunnis, be they older or younger, will have greater political trust compared to other Iraqi communities because they view the Iraqi state as their savior from ISIS. We test these hypotheses in a regression analysis using IOT data. The findings have strong implications for the future stability of the Iraqi polity as younger Iraqis come into positions of authority.