Navigating the Blueprint: The Development of Institutional Trust Structures during Adolescence

Abstract Understanding the structure of citizens’ trust in state institutions is essential for assessing its role in sustaining healthy, legitimate democracies. While research has revealed a puzzling duality in institutional trust among adults – being subdomain-specific yet unidimensionally ordered – little is known about how these patterns originate and develop. This study integrates evaluative and socialisation perspectives to investigate the development of institutional trust structures during adolescence. Using longitudinal data from the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (2018–2022), tracking adolescents from ages 12 to 16 ( N = 1,092 individuals), we employ confirmatory factor analysis and Mokken scaling to assess how the subdomain-specific and hierarchical features of institutional trust evolve across time and cognitive resources (ie school track and political sophistication). Our results support an early macro-level socialisation account of trust development, showing that adolescents as young as 12 already distinguish between order and representative institutions and consistently rank them in ways that mirror adult trust structures. However, among adolescents with higher cognitive resources, these structures become more volatile in mid-to-late adolescence, suggesting the gradual onset of more individualised, evaluative trust judgements. Taken together, the findings show a dual process of institutional trust development, suggesting that early cultural imprinting provides a baseline blueprint of institutional trust, which may later be recalibrated by more sophisticated citizens through individual evaluation.