Support for Gun Reform in the United States: The Interactive Relationship Between Partisanship and Trust in the Federal Government

Abstract

Abstract Studies find that trust in the government is statistically related to support for gun control laws in the United States. Another finding in the literature is that Democratic partisans support gun restrictions at a statistically higher percentage than do Republicans—with the reverse relationship existing for loosening gun laws. While a recent study did find an interactive relationship between trust in government and political ideology (Ryan et al. in Polit Behav 44(2):725–748, 10.1007/s11109-020-09633-2, 2022), no study explores whether the impact of trust in government on support for gun reform is, in fact, a function of partisanship. In this study, we test whether there is an interactive relationship between trust in the government and partisan identification in predicting support for gun reform. Using the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we estimate logistic regression models that find an interactive effect between trust and partisanship. For Republicans, an increase in trust in government leads to a dramatic increase in support for gun control proposals, and a substantial decrease in support for gun rights expansion. For Democrats, trust in the government has almost no impact on support for gun reform. Further, we find that political ideology has only a small substantive relationship with attitudes on gun reform when interacted with both partisanship and trust in the federal government. The practical takeaway is that to increase support for gun control among Republicans, advocates must also recognize the role of governmental distrust in attitude formation among this partisan group.

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