Replication Data for: "The Relevance of Culture: Collectivism Reduces Negativity Biases in Political Trust"

In political science, extensive research has explored negativity biases in citizens’ attitudes and behaviors. In particular, we know that citizens’ political evaluations tend to be more strongly influenced by negative than positive perceptions of traits, events and policy outcomes. In this paper, I argue that culture is a significant yet understudied correlate of negativity biases. A multilevel analysis using the World Values Survey (WVS) demonstrates that the negativity bias in political trust weakens as a society’s level of collectivism increases. Next, I explore the effect of cultural values at the individual level with data from the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). In line with the results from the WVS, I find that collectivism reduces the negative-positive asymmetry in citizens’ political trust based on perceived institutional performance. These results suggest that negativity biases should not be universally assumed as a defining feature of citizens’ attitudes toward government across different cultural contexts.