A Study of the Factors Influencing Political Trust

Political trust is one of the various types of trust dealing with relation between the state and people. Researches carried out indicate that political trust has gone through rises and falls from the begining of the revolution having had a descending trend most of the time.Since the efforts and muttos of post-revolution states have been satisfaction of people's expectations and wishes, it was expected that political trust have an increasing trend rather than a decreasing one. The theories studied in the research demonstrate that such factors as the extent of welfare, life satisfaction of people, basic trust, and the extent of people's piety play a big role in political trust. Likewise, their attitude towards the state including authorities attempts to provide welfare, religious obligations of authorities, and the proper performance of the Islamic system's access points with people influence the political trust of people.Conducting a survey method with a sample of 441 Tehrani participants above the age of 20, the present article seeks to respond to the question of the extent of people's political trust, and that of the hierarchical significance of the factors influencing political trust among the participants.The outcome of the research indicates that people's political trust is average (52% of high political trust). It also suggests that trust in the political system is higher than that inpolitical institutions and actors. Upholding most of the hypotheses raised in the research, the article comes to the conclusion that among the influential factors, welfare state, life satisfaction, and people's attitude towards the government's attempts in providing sosio-economic welfare play the biggest role in political trust according to participants.