ABSTRACT
The research for this article was made possible by the generosity of the National Science Foundation (grants SOC-75–17518 and GS-38050). I am indebted to John Booth, G. Bingham Powell, Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Mitchell Seligson for their comments and criticisms of a previous version of this article. The weaknesses remaining have been self-inflicted by the author.
Political trust and political efficacy are concepts currently undergoing considerable discussion and revision. The discussion of voting behavior in Campbell et ai (1954), Almond’s and Verba’s (1965) version of the participation hypothesis, Gamson’s (1968) trust-efficacy hypothesis, and Verba’s and Nie’s (1972) standard socioeconomic model represent quite distinct and contrasting stages in the treatment of these concepts, but share some assumptions requiring additional discussion and clarification. One of these pertains to treatment of political criticism, measured with low scores of trust in government, as political cynicism. This is not so much an operational or methodological question as a theoretical framework that has never had much to say about the role of criticism in contemporary democratic societies. This essay proffers a case in which, high levels of interpersonal distrust and high levels of government criticism notwithstanding, it is possible to make this basic distinction. Path analyses of data from a national-sample survey show that criticism is triggered by predominantly political orientations, while cynicism is a rigidified form of criticism inseparable from the social circumstances of individuals. In addition, the evidence suggests that the sense of political efficacy does not play the pivotal role assigned to it in the literature.
