Cross-cultural Analysis of Measuring Political Trust and Political Efficacy

Due to the wide variety of high-quality data sets that allow us to study public opinion in various political and public contexts, the topics of response styles and measurment invariance become very relevant. The analysis of invariance is important when you need to make sure that the set of indicators measures this particular theoretical construct and that it is stable under various national and cultural conditions. It is necessary to identify responce styles for countries in order to avoid the incorrect conclusions. That is why the purpose of this work was to analyze the measurment invariance of political trust and political efficacy and characterize response styles using the example of European Social Survey (ESS) of the 8th wave (2016). To study the measurement invariance, we used multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA), and to analyze the functioning of scales and characterization of response styles, we used the Item response theory (IRT). As a result of the analysis of the measurement invariance, it was concluded that the scales measure the same latent trait in all groups, which means that in all countries there is the same basic meaning and structure of political trust and political efficacy. But there are significant differences in intercepts, which makes it difficult to compare averages between countries. An analysis of the values ​​of the parameters of discrimination and difficulty, and item characteristic curves and item information curves showed that the scales work in countries differently and not all scales qualitatively distinguish the levels of measured latent trait, and some provide very small information about the studied traits. Also scales are not equally effective on the entire latent continuum for measuring political trust and political efficacy.