While political trust is well researched by political scientists, little attention has been paid to the repercussions of citizens’ lack of trust in the major political parties. Political parties are the institutions responsible for forming governing coalitions and channelling the policy preferences of the majorities that elected them; thus, we hypothesise that distrust in the parties can have some unsavory consequences. Namely that trust can be weaponized by elites and lead to fervent opposition to the other party’s policy proposals. Using a unique dataset from the Pew Research Centre, and leveraging an innovative instrument, we analyze how support for public policy is affected by trusting the parties to govern ethically and honestly. Our results are heterogenous. We find that respondents who trust the Republicans to govern ethically and honestly reward the party with opposition to the Democrats’ policy positions. Conversely, we find no change in support for public policy among those who trust the Democrats to govern ethically and honestly. The theoretical implications of these results speak to the rise of populism in America, a topic we also briefly address in the conclusion.

尽管政治学家对政治信任进行了深入研究，但很少关注公民对主要政党缺乏信任的影响。政党是负责组建执政联盟并引导选举他们的多数人的政策偏好的机构；因此，我们假设对各方的不信任会产生一些令人讨厌的后果。也就是说，这种信任可以被精英武器化，并导致强烈反对对方的政策建议。使用皮尤研究中心的独特数据集，并利用创新工具，我们分析了信任各方以合乎道德和诚实的方式进行治理如何影响对公共政策的支持。我们的结果是异质的。我们发现，信任共和党以道德和诚实的方式执政的受访者会以反对民主党政策立场的方式奖励该党。相反，我们发现那些相信民主党以道德和诚实治理的人对公共政策的支持没有变化。这些结果的理论含义说明了美国民粹主义的兴起，我们也在结论中简要讨论了这个话题。