A substantial part of our confidence is explained by our early experiences. By comparing non-identical twins and siblings with identical twins, who share almost all traits and experiences, we can estimate their importance for our political attitudes.
In many current democracies, the trust in politics is very low or declining. This is a notable development in itself, but it may be especially important because trust is associated with other results relevant — for example, if we vote or if we follow the law.
This effect became particularly evident during a pandemicwhen it was found that people who trusted more in politicians were more likely to comply with confinement rules.
Political scientists tend to view trust as a dynamic concept. When politicians perform poorly, our confidence diminishes. And there is abundant evidence to that effect. When the economy is bad or when politicians are involved in scandalsconfidence tends to be lower.
This way of thinking about trust is, of course, useful, but one of the problems is that it is difficult to explain why people’s trust levels tend to be stable. When people reach a certain level of confidence in early adulthood, they rarely change it significantly.
Furthermore, people do not always react with the intensity than we could imagine to events such as political scandals — so it is not certain that performance is the only cause of low trust.
One explanation for this apparent contradiction is that trust can also be influenced by our formative experiencesexplains Edmund Kellyresearcher at the University of Oxford, in an article in .
This doesn’t mean that trust never changes later on—it obviously does. But, from this perspective, each person would have a base confidence levelstable, shaped by his early experiences with the political system.
The way our parents talked about politics while we were growing up, or how governments performed when we started paying attention to politics, can influence our baseline level of trust.
We know that these experiences affect other aspects of our relationship with politics — for example, our electoral behavior and our values politicians.
However, These ideas are difficult to prove. Academics generally study political attitudes by surveying random samples of the population. These surveys question our opinions and the factors that may be influencing them (for example, household income).
But they rarely address our formative experiences — in part because people cannot be expected to remember exactly experiences that occurred many years ago.
It’s also difficult to know what experiences to include. Obviously, we can’t ask about everything — that would be expensive and tedious — but that means we can miss relevant aspects.
One way to get around this problem is to study twins and brotherssince we know that they largely share their formative experiences and the traits developed early in life. In this way, it is possible to study these factors without having to measure them directly.
To the compare non-identical twins and siblingswho share many traits and experiences, with identical twinswho share almost all traits and experiences, we can estimate their importance for our political attitudes.
This is precisely the focus of one by Edmund Kelly, who suggests that a substantial part of our trust is explained by our early experiences — maybe up to 40%.
Early life and political trust
One possible explanation for this is that important traits formed early in life, such as our personality, can affect our ability to trust the political system. Some people are naturally more affablefor example, and it is plausible that they are also more confident.
This is a line of argument that Kelly has addressed in some of his work, but the evidence in this regard is less conclusive.
Instead, it seems more likely that people with similar personality profiles are equally confident because grew up in environments that predisposed them so much for these traits of personality as to have greater or lesser confidence not system.
An alternative, perhaps more plausible, scenario is that environmental conditions that we experience early in life can influence the degree of trust we will place in politics.
For example, the experience of economic difficulties in childhood is associated with our ability to trust the system in the long termespecially if we consider that the government is responsible for these difficulties.
We would also expect that our educational experiences influence trust — for example, by providing us with knowledge about the system that allows us to do more informed judgments about its reliability.
Thus, Edmund Kelly concludes, the relationship between trust and voter turnout may therefore not result from the fact that trust causes voting, but that the our formative experiences influence both.
