Replication Data for: "Revisiting the link between political trust and political participation"

Political trust is typically seen as a cause of political participation
and thus declining levels of trust in politicians and institutions are of
ten blamed for political disengagement. By revisiting the formation of
political trust, we argue that this blame may be misplaced. We show
that the correlation between political trust and participation is largely
explained by heritable predispositions which make some people simultaneously more likely to trust political authorities and to participate in
politics. Using variance decomposition models and co-twin control designs with data from three twin studies from the United States, Sweden
and Australia, we demonstrate that trust is moderately heritable and
that previous estimates of the association between trust and participation are over-stated. This result is robust to multiple operationalizations
and specifications. We conclude that political trust may be less likely to
affect political behaviour than previously thought.