Trust in Government Matters When it Comes to Attitudes towards Gun Policy
Party affiliation is a better predictor of attitudes towards gun policies than ideology
By: Mila Seppälä
What kinds of things impact the way people feel about gun policy?
Partisanship probably comes to mind first for most of us. Indeed, consistently, both political parties and their supporters have diverged on the issue of guns with the gap only widening with time.
Political scientist Robert Spitzer (1995) notes that the first time gun control and expansion of gun rights appeared in the Democratic and Republican Party Platforms respectively was in 1968 after the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy. In 2021, according to a Pew Research Center study, 81% of survey respondents identifying as Democrats wanted stricter gun laws while the same was true only for 20% of Republicans.
Instinctively, the importance of trust also made sense to me as I first began my Ph.D. dissertation research into gun politics in the United States from the outside — all the way from Finland.
Why is that we have such a different approach to guns and private gun ownership in Finland? Or better yet why is it that the United States has such a unique gun culture, where private citizens own guns for the sole purpose of self-defense, where they carry them to public spaces and also use them in ways that are sometimes entirely antithetical to the safety of communities as a whole? How did the language of freedom become so intertwined with the right to own guns?
Some will argue that it is due to the U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment. Some will point to history, to the citizen militias of the past and a gun culture marked by the unruliness of the frontier and the violent conquering of the west. Historian Pamela Haag (2016) convincingly traces how gun manufactures in the 1800s began to mass produce firearms and in doing so also manufactured myths about the U.S. as a gun nation in order to create a market for them. Certainly, all these factors have played some part.
Yet, arguably, the type of culture of armed self-defense characterized by such policies as “concealed carry” and “stand your ground” is a recent phenomenon, evinced just by how new these laws are.
I wanted to know what is in the lived experiences of people that makes them believe that the expansion of private gun ownership makes them safer. Trust seemed like a good place to start. There are countless differences between Finland and the United States but to me, one of the more fundamental issues is how much we trust our institutions (or don’t) and what we believe the role of government should be.
After all, proponents of gun rights often site the right of people to defend themselves from the tyranny of the government as the rationale for the Second Amendment. Studies on gun owners and defensive gun ownership seem to also reflect this lack of trust in government. The “good guys with guns” — or the citizen-protectors as sociologist Jennifer Carlson describes them (2015) — speak of social decline of communities and the inability of law enforcement and government policies to keep them and their loved ones safe.
Trust seems to be at the center of the rhetoric of those advocating for defensive gun ownership.
I shared these reflections about trust and guns with my Ph.D. supervisor. He told me we should test it. And test we did.
In our paper published in Political Behavior, we used the 2022 Cooperative Election Study survey, administered by YouGov, to estimate models that predict approval for different gun control and gun rights expansion policies. Our findings were clear and straightforward.
Those survey respondents that identified as Republican were significantly more likely to support gun control measures if they had high amounts of trust towards the government, while their support for gun rights expansion increased as their trust in government declined. For Democrats, their levels of trust towards the government had almost no impact in their attitudes towards gun control and gun rights expansion policies.
We also found that when testing the impact of partisanship and trust in government in attitudes towards gun policies, political ideology did not play a significant role. In other words, it did not matter if a Republican identified as “very conservative” or “very liberal” in their attitudes towards gun policies. This indicates that partisanship is a better predictor of attitudes towards gun policies than ideology.
Or as we argue in our paper, there is nothing inherently conservative about believing that for example teachers should be armed. It is a partisan position, propagated by partisan actors through different channels such as party platforms and partisan news sources.
Partisanship and political ideology do correlate, but they are not synonymous, and at least on the issue of guns, people hold beliefs that are not neatly aligned with the ideological spectrum.
For advocates of gun violence prevention policies, our study has two main implications. Firstly, if attempting to persuade Republican voters, trust in government is an important frame to consider in messaging; for Democrats, it is not as consequential. Secondly, if attitudes towards guns are not ingrained ideological beliefs but partisan positions, it is, at least theoretically, an easier task to change them.
References:
Carlson, J. (2015). Citizen-protectors: The everyday politics of guns in an age of decline. Oxford University Press.
Haag, P. (2016). The gunning of America: business and the making of American gun culture. New York: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Hansen, M.A., & Seppälä, M. (2023). ”Support for gun reform in the United States: The Interactive relationship between partisanship and trust in the federal government.” Political Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09907-5
Pew Research Center. (2021). “Amid a series of mass shootings in the U.S., gun policy remains deeply divisive.” 20 April 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/04/20/amid-a-series-of-mass-shootings-in-the-u-s-gun-policy-remains-deeply-divisive/
Spitzer, R. J. (1995). The politics of gun control (2nd ed.). Chatham House.
Mila Seppälä is a Ph.D. candidate at the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. In her dissertation, she examines the gun violence prevention movement in the United States.