3. Suspicious Minds: Towards a Typology of Political Distrust

This article analyses the concept of political distrust and theorizes the sources of different types of political distrust in a liberal democracy. Political distrust, or suspicion towards politics, has not been studied as much as political trust, although political theory has emphasized the importance of distrust in democracy since ancient times. The plentiful research on political trust shows that the importance of political trust varies depending on whether it is about an idea, a system, or an actor. However, distrust understood as the counterpart of trust in these studies has mostly been viewed in an unstructured way as a privatization of trust. Based on liberal political theory, we argue that the typologization of political distrust could bring new dimensions to understanding liberal democracy. An asymmetric approach to the political distrust concept enables the discovery of its potential sources and causal mechanisms, which can offer an improved explanation for the effects of political distrust on liberal democracy. We structure the theory as four ideal types of a politically suspicious citizen, which offers guidelines for the empirical study of distrust in democracies with the potential for new knowledge that can offer practical advice for strengthening both established and young democracies.