Political Cynicism: A Critical Re-Examination
Abstract
Cynicism has been understood both as a motivating source for change as well as a deep-rooted obstacle. This paper argues that part of the problem is that current survey scale items for political cynicism studies are flawed. This paper proposes modifications to question wording based on a historical etymology of the term cynicism as well as a systematic analysis of past question wordings. Several European studies on political cynicism were used as a theoretical basis for a replication and extension of their work. A study was conducted using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service and students at Wake Forest University to evaluate the scale. While the results made it difficult to disentangle political cynicism from related constructs like political trust and political alienation, they did confirm the reliability of a new scale.