Document Type : Science - Research (Political Science)

Authors

• Jahangir Jahangiri ¹
• Fatemeh AboutorabiZarchi ²

¹ Faculty member of Shiraz University

² M.A. in Political Sociology from Shiraz University

Abstract

Trust as basis and foundation of social interactions and relationships is very important especially in relationships between people and government. The result of the conducted studies around the country showed that the rate of political trust has been in variation since the beginning of the Islamic revolution. This series of studies have enumerated different factors for this situation. These studies had less attention to students as active actors in the political arena. This research is trying to investigate the factors related to the political trust of Shiraz University students with the use of survey (measurement) method. Englehart theory was applied as a theoretical framework to study the affects of variables such as social capital, religiousness, satisfaction with life, use of mass media and super-cultural structures on students political trust. In this research, political actors and institutions were taken under consideration as the indicators of dimensions of political trust.
The result showed that 26.7 percent of the students have low political trust, 73.3 percent of them have average to high political trust and the rate of confidence in political system is more than confidence in political institutions and actors. According to the step by step regression results, it can be said that among the variables entered the regression, religiousness, use of internal media, use of external media, membership in political-religious associations, satisfaction with life, Shia’ religion and membership in socio-cultural groups remain that make 47.1% of the dependent variables. The inward group social capital variant has a positive and significant relation with the political trust, but the amount of income has a negative and significant relation with political trust. The relationship between variants of level of education and ethnicity is also significant.

Keywords

• Students
• Life Satisfaction
• social capital
• religion
• Mass media