Keywords: News, media, journalism and public opinion

Political trust is essential in democracies as citizens transfer their power to politicians trusting they will use this power for the greater good and not to pursue their own interest. Accordingly, scholars focused on political trust in order to investigate explanatory factors of trust judgements towards politicians but focused on different types of trust. On the one hand, trust judgments can be directed towards individual politicians. Hence, individualized trust takes a single politician into account. On the other hand, trust judgments can be more generalized, for instance, if trust judgments rely on various politicians or a whole group of politicians.
Regarding these two types of political trust, namely individualized trust in single politicians and generalized trust in politicians as a group, there is an academic dispute about how these trust judgments are connected to each other. Do individualized trust judgments influence general trust in politicians or do general trust judgments towards politicians, in turn, have a bearing on peoples’ perception about individual politicians? Recent research provides at least two contrasting perspectives on how individualized trust judgements towards politicians as well as generalized trust judgements are built. Cultural theories claim that (social) trust is gained early in live and as generalized expectancy shapes individual trust judgements. Following this, cultural theories imply a causal direction from generalized trust in politicians to individualized trust judgements towards politicians. Moreover, trust judgements seems to be rather stable constructs which did not vary much over time. In contrast to this, institutional theories or experiential theories claim that political trust is based on personal experiences with institutions or political authorities. According to these approaches, the sum of smaller trust units (single experiences) results in a greater, generalized trust unit. Accordingly, trust judgments could be rather transient compared to the assumptions of cultural theories.
Within the present paper, we want to clarify the relationship between generalized trust judgments and individualized trust judgements in order to answer questions about causality between both constructs. To do so, we conducted an ambulatory assessment study via smartphone in Germany and Israel with about 90 participants in each country. Immediately after media exposure participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about the message they just received as well as their trust judgements about specific politicians. At the evening they got additional questions about their general trust judgments. We rely on multilevel regression as well as latent state and trait analysis in order to evaluate the data.
In the German case, first results show that generalized trust is indeed rather stable compared to individualized trust judgements. These findings clearly support our assumptions about the stability of both constructs. Regarding causal effects, we did neither find effects on individualized trust nor on generalized trust. Surprisingly, both constructs seems not to be connected in the short term. The Israeli data is still under investigations but will be presented at the conference. Moreover, we will discuss the results against the background of the aforementioned political trust theories as well as change of political trust over time.