The standard US trust-in-government measure actually taps political cynicism.

Evidence

Again, only one of these questions—the first—actually uses the term trust. The third question might elicit a judgment of policies more than of trust. The second and fourth questions address motivations that might bear on the trustworthiness of officials. As is true also for the General Social Survey questions, answers to these questions tend to be strongly correlated, so that it is sensible to claim that they are tapping something coherent even though it is arguably bold to assert that they tap a sense of trust in any particular conception of trust. Reputedly, when they were first added to the National Elections Studies battery, these questions were intended to tap political cynicism, not trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 897

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that the NES battery’s four questions were designed to measure cynicism, not trust — a definitional correction about what the canonical survey actually measures.
• XREF: Connects to the GSS trust questions discussed earlier in the book and to Luhmann/Hardin’s methodological critique of survey-based trust measurement.