Analyzing mass perceptions of nuclear politics: Puzzling over trust

The juxtaposition of public values, trust, and beliefs is at the core of policy-making in democratic political systems, and an accurate understanding of nuclear politics requires that researchers untangle and carefully think about the web of psychological and social influences that shape citizens' preferences. In this paper, we offer some tentative answers about several pieces of the trust open-quotes puzzleclose quotes. First, we reconsider what is meant by open-quotes trustclose quotes and how it is to be measured. We then use telephone survey data to explore the relationship between trust and citizens' nuclear policy preferences. The data lend support to the conclusion that trust is more mutable than previous research has shown, and besides the traditional measure of competence includes aspects of believability and fiduciary competence. The data further indicate that it is a mistake to think in terms of a single open-quotes publicclose quotes when exploring the link between trust and nuclear policies. A number of dissimilar open-quotes publicsclose quotes based on shared open-quotes worldviewsclose quotes or political cultures are apparent in the data analyzed here. These open-quotes publicsclose quotes appear to think about trust differently from one another and rely on different dimensions of trust when determining nuclear policy preferences. Policy-makers must recognize the different open-quotes publicsclose quotes coexisting within the U.S. nuclear policy arena, and the relative import that these publics place on different dimensions of trust