Shaping Farm Workers' Political Trust: The Moderating Role of Misinformation Exposure

Political trust is an important indicator for evaluating relations between politicians and stakeholders. In agriculture, political trust has not been researched in depth, although agriculture is highly regulated by policies related to access to resources. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by answering the question of the role of institutionalized and non-institutionalized social communication in shaping farm workers' political trust. The multiple regression on a sample of 1,016 farm workers from the Europe-wide 2020 European Social Survey yields new insights. A key finding is the moderating effect of the opinion that online communication channels expose people to misinformation on the relationship between farm workers' trust in politics as a dependent variable and frequency of social contacts, time spent monitoring politics and current affairs, and membership in professional associations. In addition, political trust was found to increase as farm workers' interest in politics and monitoring news about politics and current affairs increased. While political trust is positively associated with farm workers' institutionalized participation in professional associations, it is negatively associated with non-institutionalized networking. Confirmation bias associated with farm workers' networking is particularly risky. Another important finding is lower political trust among households with a subjectively worse financial situation. Implications for Central European audience: Government, formal networks (professional associations), and informal networks (social networks) provide verified and trustworthy information. At the same time, farmers themselves should have sufficient information literacy to critically assess the credibility of the information. The farm worker's education plays an important role and is significantly related to most of the main effects. The study's conclusions also include suggestions for follow-up research.