Introduction

Declines in political trust in the United States over the past several decades have generated considerable scholarly debate and research (e.g., House and Mason 1975; Hart 1978; Lipset and Schneider 1983; Hetherington 1999; Schyns and Koop 2010; Bennett et al. 2013; Wu and Wilkes 2018; Citrin and Stoker 2018). Within this scholarship, a growing literature explores political trust and distrust among adversely racialized populations (e.g., Aberbach and Walker 1970; Michelson 2003; Avery 2006; Nunnally 2012; Mangum 2016; Koch 2019; Rosenthal 2019; Wu, Wilkes, and Wilson 2022). Such research has adopted one of two analytic angles, roughly following Easton’s (1975) influential distinction between “diffuse” and “specific” trust. One angle focuses on the overall sentiment toward the political system writ large (e.g., Aberbach and Walker 1970; Shingles 1981). The other attends to trust or distrust toward particular parts of the government, such as police, courts, or politicians (e.g., Longazel, Parker, and Sun 2011; Rios 2011; Bell 2016; Clair 2021; Evangelist 2022). The latter angle corrects the sometimes overly generalized portrait produced by the former, but not without a cost. It may encourage an atomized view, one that cannot capture patterns in sentiment regarding various governing institutions.

This article undertakes an alternative analytic angle. Drawing inspiration from research on the “many hands of the state” (Morgan and Orloff 2017) and “spillover” dynamics (Cook, Levi, and Hardin 2009; Levitt 2015), we foreground the question of scope. By scope, we mean sentiments of political distrust (or political trust) across multiple aspects of statecraft. Scope, we contend, cannot be inferred from responses to broad, conventional questions, such as whether one trusts the government to “do what is right” or “make decisions in a fair way,” nor from stances regarding a single or a few governmental bodies. Instead, it requires analysis of sentiments about the various governmental officials and state agencies that non-dominant racialized populations encounter directly, vicariously, or through public discourse.

Our approach to scope builds on recent sociological efforts to insert meaning-making into the study of political trust and distrust (e.g., Wu, Wilkes, and Wilson 2022). Specifically, we investigate “racial state frames,” the interpretive lens actors use to assess the “racial” nature and outcomes of government actors and actions, including racialized state harm. To this end, we ask: What is the relationship between racial state frames and the scope of political distrust among minoritized individuals?

We explore this question through a qualitative interview-based study of liberal and progressive Latinos during the first Trump presidency, a tumultuous and traumatizing period for many Latinos and immigrants (Canizales and Agius Vallejo 2021; Rodríguez-Muñiz 2021). Between 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic, we interviewed 69 Latino residents in the Chicagoland and San Francisco Bay areas. Participants were more or less politically homogeneous, yet they were diverse in other respects (e.g., age, class, gender, and immigrant generation)—a sample designed to allow us to consider variation in scope among ideologically similar respondents. In this approach, we depart from the prevailing focus on comparative studies of the so-called “racial trust gap” (e.g., Aberbach and Walker 1970; Bech 2023) to shed light on intra-party heterogeneity among minoritized populations.

Unsurprisingly, our analysis revealed profound distrust of Trump and his administration. This finding is unsurprising for at least two reasons. First, as noted above, as liberals and progressives, participants were generally politically antagonistic toward Trump and the Republican Party. Second, at the time of the survey, Trump’s well-documented rhetoric against Latino immigrants and his administration’s draconian immigration policies and abysmal response to environmental devastation in Puerto Rico offered interviewees fertile grounds for distrust.

Scope was a different story. Despite uniform distrust for Trump and his administration, our analysis uncovered significant variation in the scope of political distrust. Some respondents voiced what we describe as a “narrow” distrust, often limited to a single politician (e.g., President Trump) or governmental agency (e.g., law enforcement). Others expressed an “expansive” scope, distrusting numerous governmental and state actors and agencies. A slight majority of respondents, those we characterize as having a “moderate” scope, fell between these poles. Notably, variation in scope neither mapped neatly onto political or sociodemographic indicators (i.e., partisanship, gender, class, or generational status) nor stemmed, in any straightforward sense, from racist or otherwise negative encounters with the government and its agencies (e.g., police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Census Bureau, or congressional offices).

Our analysis instead revealed that variation in scope was consistently associated with distinct racial state frames. Although our data make it difficult to determine directionality, the pattern is consistent. For example, nearly all respondents with a “narrow” scope of distrust interpreted state harm as the fault of specific “racist” individuals or “bad apples.” Alternatively, those with “expansive” distrust held a more systemic and institutional racial state frame. Individuals with a “moderate” scope generally saw state racism as the consequence of the political overrepresentation of whites and the underrepresentation of Latinos and other people of color. Crucially, each of these racial state frames contained a theory of change: each prescribed distinct solutions or ways to minimize governmental harm. Hence, racial state frames offered insight into how respondents assessed government and how they envisioned political change.

Ultimately, our analysis suggests a contingent relationship between social position, experiences with and perceptions of the government, and the scope of political distrust. Racial state frames, we argue, help us better understand how minoritized individuals with similar encounters with the government and similar partisan, generational, class, and other demographic positions may nonetheless diverge in their political distrust, and how those with distinct encounters and positionalities might share similar scopes of distrust. By introducing the novel concept of racial state frames, we highlight the critical role of interpretive frames in assessments of government, thereby advancing a more sociologically grounded theorization of political distrust in racialized social systems.

The Scope of Political Distrust

While political distrust has received comparatively less attention than political trust, it has sparked generative debate about the nature of liberal democratic governance. Pushing back on its original framing as corrosive or detrimental (see Easton 1965), some scholars have argued that a degree of political distrust is fundamental to ensuring the checks and balances and institutional safeguards necessary to prevent tyranny (Pettit 1997; Hardin 2004). Some scholars have also theorized distrust as part and parcel of a “critical citizenship” essential in democratic societies marked by social inequality (see Norris 1999); here, political distrust is proffered as a foundational aspect of liberal democracy and, arguably, a needed corrective to passive trust.

Along with normative contention about political distrust, there is limited definitional consensus. Scholars differ, for instance, on whether political distrust is an umbrella category that can usefully house sentiments of cynicism, alienation, skepticism, and mistrust (Lenard 2008; Citrin and Stoker 2018) and whether it is the opposite of political trust or something qualitatively different (Van De Walle and Six 2014; Intawan and Nicholson 2018). Such debates are not simply theoretical; they have significant consequences for the ways the concept is operationalized in empirical research.

For our present purposes, we build on aspects of Bertsou’s (2019) recent retheorization. Despite its widespread invocation, Bertsou contends that political distrust remains an “under-theorized and neglected” concept (213). She challenges the conflation of political distrust with a lack of trust and its treatment as functionally equivalent to political trust. Apparent similarities, Bertsou argues, hide profound ontological differences. Whereas a lack of trust registers an absence of something, political distrust “represents a distinct state with particular psychological and behavioural implications” (224). Moreover, this distinct state is not the mere opposite of political trust. Although both are “relational attitudes,” only political distrust “entails the expectation of harmful outcomes” (220).

Bertsou’s (2019) theoretical model thus roots political distrust in expectations of government harm. She focuses on three perceived or anticipated forms of harm. Although analytically distinct, these forms may overlap in practice. Social actors may, for instance, fear that the government’s “technical incompetence” may cause them harm. They might also worry about harm from officials and agencies that violate “communal norms of what is ‘right,’ ‘just,’ and ‘good’” (Bertsou 2019: 221). Indeed, scholars of probity and procedural justice have found greater political distrust when individuals perceive the government as corrupt and unaccountable to the public (Grimes 2006; Uslaner 2017; Martin et al. 2020). In addition, individuals may expect harm from what they perceive as incompatible or “incongruent interests” between themselves and government officials. Bertsou (2019: 222) suggests that such expectations are especially prominent in “deeply divided communities along ethnic, religious, and partisan lines.”

Expectations of harm are not limited to any specific aspect of government. Indeed, as Bertsou (2019: 220) notes, the governed may expect harm from the “political system in its entirety or its components.” As previously noted, much of the extant scholarship has focused either on sentiments toward certain agencies or those toward the government as a whole. As a result, scholars have paid scant attention to the scope of political distrust. However, a growing body of research shows that sentiments or expectations about one political institution may affect sentiments about others (Cook, Levi, and Hardin 2009; Levitt 2015; Nichols, LeBrón, and Pedraza 2018; Bertsou 2019). Such “spillover” is far from universal, but it nonetheless invites us to consider how far distrust and expectations of harm span various aspects of the political system.

In the following, we distinguish three types of scope: narrow, moderate, and expansive (See Figure 1). A narrow scope suggests distrust is limited to a single or a few governmental agents. At the other end of the spectrum is expansive distrust, which we reserve for individuals who distrust multiple governmental agents. The moderate scope sits between these two poles. Our use of the word “moderate” is not normative, but meant to capture a scope of distrust toward more than a few but fewer than many governing entities.

Figure 1: Scope of Political Distrust.

“Narrow” and “expansive” scope is somewhat resonant with Easton’s (1975) contrast between “specific” and “diffuse” system support. However, there are key differences. First, Easton’s typology emphasizes political trust rather than distrust. Second, whereas Easton was concerned with whether individuals trusted either specific political leaders or the regime as a whole, our analysis prioritizes something akin to what scholars of generalized trust describe as the “radius” of trust (Delhey, Newton, and Welzel 2011) in the political realm. Accordingly, we do not consider expansive distrust as conceptually equivalent to “diffuse” distrust. We instead recognize that actors whose distrust spans multiple governmental institutions are more likely to distrust the political system as a whole than are actors with narrower scopes of distrust.

Bertsou’s definition of political distrust as inherently connected to expectations of harm provides an important starting point for our analysis. However, it does not explicitly address expectations of government harm and the scope of political distrust among adversely racialized populations. To this end, we first turn to research on race and political distrust. This scholarship offers insights into how such actors might encounter and experience government agents and appraise their untrustworthiness.

Race and Governmental Harm

An interdisciplinary community of scholars of political trust and distrust foregrounds race and racism (see Wilkes and Wu 2018). This literature departs, by and large, from what philosopher Charles Mills (2005: 168) criticized as “ideal theory”—that is, theory that privileges “idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual.” For the social scientist, such an orientation can distort empirical reality, leading analysts, for instance, in the U.S. context, to present a “partial and highly salutary view of the American state” (Soss and Weaver 2017: 584; see also Prowse, Weaver, and Meares 2020; de Leon and Clarno 2020).

Against abstracted, if not idealized, conceptions of state-citizen relations, scholars have investigated the experiences and perspectives of racially marginalized populations. This work challenges the universality of leading explanations of political distrust. Revisiting the old debate between Citrin (1974) and Miller (1974), Avery (2006) found that political distrust among African Americans is rooted in systemic discontent rather than assessments of political officials and policies. Similarly, Hetherington and Globetti (2002) found that warmth toward the president increased political trust among whites but had little effect on African Americans. And based on experiments with Latino and white participants, Bech (2023: 825) found that “trust responses to political rhetoric about minorities vary with message valence, audience ethnicity and ingroup identification.” These results suggest that analysts should not assume, a priori, that factors such as partisanship, performance, and probity operate or have the same effects on populations racialized as non-white that they do on populations racialized as white.

Scholars have also introduced new factors that may attenuate or foster political distrust among minoritized populations. Following Aberbach and Walker (1970) and Shingles (1981), some works in this vein have explored the role of racial group consciousness (e.g., Avery 2006; Nunnally 2012; Mangum 2012). Mangum (2016) found that how individuals assess the economic position of their ethnoracial population relative to other ethnoracial populations may increase political distrust. Other works have focused on the impact of political underrepresentation (e.g., Williams 1998; Heideman 2020; Mora, Dowling, Rodríguez-Muñiz 2021) and acculturation (e.g., Michelson 2003, 2007; Wenzel 2006; Abrajano and Alvarez 2010).

Most critical for our purposes, scholars have identified various forms of governmental harm experienced by minoritized individuals and populations. These include discrimination (e.g., Nunnally 2012; Saleem et al. 2019), neglect (e.g., Stivers 2007; John 2020; Decoteau 2024), and violence (e.g., Romero 2000; Gaynor, Kang, and Williams 2021; Van Natta 2023; Wilson et al. 2024). These harms arise from encounters with state agencies and actors. However, encounters can take multiple forms and are not limited to personal experiences. As such, we find it helpful to differentiate between experiential, vicarious, and discursive encounters. Experiential encounters are those that a person directly experiences, such as interactions with police officers at a traffic stop or with street-level bureaucrats at an unemployment office. Individuals also encounter the government vicariously, via the reported experiences of family members, friends, and coworkers, such as stories about police abuse or surveillance at public hospitals. Finally, people encounter the government through public discourse, such as political speeches, mediatized images and representations, and historical narratives.

Experiential, vicarious, and discursive encounters can all nurture expectations of government harm among minoritized populations. For example, police harassment in marginalized communities encourages “legal cynicism” and estrangement from law enforcement and the government, more generally (e.g., Kirk and Papachristos 2011; Soss and Weaver 2017; Bell 2017; Hitchens, Carr, and Clampet-Lundquist 2018; Ramírez 2023; Rosenthal 2023; Rocha Beardall 2024). Similarly, punitive immigration enforcement and deportation can fuel “a deep sense of political alienation” among both immigrant and U.S.-born Latinos (Rocha, Knoll, and Wrinkle 2015: 912; see also Nichols, LeBrón, and Pedraza 2018). Negative treatment in sites of public provision (e.g., welfare offices and health clinics) can also instill distrust and fear in Native, Black, and Latino communities (Roberts 2002; Fong 2019; Vargas 2022; Decoteau and Sweet 2024). In addition, political rhetoric and stereotypes about minoritized and immigrant populations can foster political distrust (Pérez 2015; Bech 2023), as can images and recordings of state abuses, such as police shootings of unarmed Black men (Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk 2016). Although likely less impactful than ongoing mistreatment and structural inequalities (see Bajaj and Stanford 2021; Decoteau and Sweet 2024), historical accounts about racialized governmental harm, such as medical experimentation, can also contribute to political distrust (Jamison, Quinn, and Freimuth 2019; McCarthy, Hagan, and Herda 2020).

We caution, however, that much of the above research draws a direct line between governmental harms from state encounters and political distrust, as if harms were objective “stimuli” producing levels of trust and distrust. Yet, as sociologists have long argued, consciousness does not straightforwardly follow experience. Social actors—including minoritized actors—are sense- and meaning-making creatures. With that in mind, we contend that the impact of experienced and expected governmental harm on the scope of political distrust depends, in part, on how actors perceive said harm, including whether they perceive it as race-based. Indeed, research shows that individuals—even those from the same racialized population—may differ on what they consider a “racist” act and how they conceptualize the mechanics of racism (see Dowling 2014; Wingfield and Chavez 2020; Bonilla-Silva 2022). Consequently, we need to pay greater attention to the cultural meanings through which actors from marginalized populations perceive the government, ascribe racial meaning to government actors and state agencies, and how this process relates to the scope of political distrust.

Racial State Frames

Our approach to the study of racialized harm and the scope of political distrust builds upon literature on the “racial state” (Omi and Winant 1986; Goldberg 2002; Feagin and Elias 2020; Pirtle 2023). Scholars working in this growing area challenge the treatment of race as exogenous to modern statecraft and political systems. Through national censuses (Mora 2014; Loveman 2014; Thompson 2016), immigration policies (Ngai 2004; FitzGerald and Cook-Martín 2014; Martínez 2022; Kim 2025), and prisons (Wacquant 2002; Walker 2016), among other mechanisms, state agencies have actively instituted and naturalized “racial conceptualizations” (Morning 2011). Volumes of work document how modern governments have used racial conceptualizations to institutionalize inequalities. For example, throughout much of U.S. history, a “non-white” classification was the basis for exclusion from citizenship and enfranchisement (Fields 1990; Haney López 1996; Fox and Guglielmo 2012; Gómez 2020). State-led racialization efforts have operated at all levels of government, with state, local, and federal agencies often implementing policies and practices that, intentionally or inadvertently, targeted people of color and reinforced racial domination (Jung and Kwon 2020).

Although scholars have examined the historical and contemporary operations of the U.S. racial and empire state, how adversely racialized populations have perceived and imagined the government has received less attention. Addressing this inattention requires an analytical shift from the ways governmental actors come to “see” like a state (Scott 1998) to the ways the “state comes into view” for the governed (Corbridge et al. 2005: 7). These appraisals of the state, as scholars of state-society relations have long shown (e.g., Brissette 2016; Rodríguez-Muñiz 2017; Boutros 2018), are constructed through imaginaries, ideologies, and emotions. What matters for this line of inquiry is the cultural meanings that shape what people perceive as “the state” and how they interpret what they designate as “the state.” The “what” question refers to what social actors consider part of the government or political system, determinations that demarcate “society” from the “state.” The “how” question, in contrast, captures the ways that said “state” is viewed—for instance, as proficient or wasteful, corrupt or accountable. In both respects, cultural meanings can powerfully mediate the relationship between one’s social location and one’s stances about government trustworthiness. Recent work on political trust suggests as much, calling on scholars to pay more attention to individuals’ “perceptions of government processes” (Citrin and Stoker 2018) and conceptions of “justice” in their analyses (Wu, Wilkes, and Wilson 2022).

We take up this call, turning to the sociologically rich concept of “frames.” Frames are one of several concepts (i.e., schemas, scripts, ideologies) that cultural sociologists have developed to better understand the role of meaning in social life (Spillman 2020). Although these notions are often used interchangeably, recent work highlights important differences (see Wood, Stoltz, Van Ness, and Taylor 2018; Boutyline and Soter 2021).

We have chosen frames for both conceptual and substantive reasons. Conceptually, frames sit at the nexus of personal and public culture (Lizardo 2017) and help individuals assimilate and interpret public information and experiences. As Feagin (2020: 18) writes, individuals “have numerous frames for understanding and interpreting social life in their minds, and their frames vary in complexity from specific micro-level framing of situations to a broad framing of society.” Importantly, we add, frames do not straightforwardly reflect personal experiences or social positions; rather, they refract them (Wilson 2011). Substantively, scholars of race have profitably used frames in nuanced ways to examine a range of topics, including the criminal justice system (Carlson 2019), education (Warikoo and de Novais 2015), and labor markets (Young 2010).

Drawing together sociological literatures on frames and the racial state, we develop the concept of racial state frames. Racial state frames are interpretive lenses that help social actors process and make sense of government officials and state agencies, whether through direct, vicarious, or discursive encounters. What distinguishes this type of frame from other state frames (e.g., gendered state frames) or state imaginaries (Brissette 2016) is its focus on the interplay of race, politics, and power: racial state frames are interpretations about the “racial” nature of the government and character of its actions.

We do not assume that racial state frames are universally present or salient. Their existence and effects are contingent, even in “racialized social systems” (Bonilla-Silva 1997). However, where present, such frames likely draw from broader, sometimes competing, societal understandings and ideologies about race and racism. Thus, racial state frames may resonate with—and contingently transpose—these broader understandings into the realm of politics and civic life. In a sense, they stipulate or reinforce a kind of racial-political ontology.

As with racial conceptualizations and ideologies more generally, multiple racial state frames likely exist within populations and across societies, though some may be hegemonic at a given moment. For instance, one frame might encourage individuals to conceive the government, whether in whole or in part, as racially oppressive, while another may invite individuals to see the government as race-neutral. A given frame might also construe political phenomena, such as corruption or representation, as racially beneficial, inconsequential, or harmful. Where racialized harm at the hands of the government is perceived, sentiments of distrust, per Bertsou (2019), are likely present. We suspect that different frames will help foster distinct interpretations of the rationales, sources, and consequences of race-based governmental harm. This fact raises questions about the relationship between racial state frames and the scope of political distrust. In what follows, we pursue such an inquiry among a politically similar sample of U.S. Latinos during the first Trump administration.

U.S. Latinos and Political Distrust

There is significantly less work on Latinos and political distrust than on other major ethnoracial populations. The existing research paints a complex, if incomplete, picture. Studies have found evidence, for instance, that Latinos are often more trusting of government than are other minoritized populations (Michelson 2001; Wenzel 2006; Abrajano and Alvarez 2010). However, this finding is likely dependent on the timing, context, and composition of the population sampled (see Abrajano and Alvarez 2010). Past work has also identified acculturation as strongly related to political distrust (Michelson 2003, 2007), with the second and third generations, on average, being less trusting than the first (see also Flores-González 2017). However, this effect does not seem to operate in rural contexts (Munier, Albarracin, and Boeckelman 2015). Additionally, research suggests that personal encounters with racial discrimination may make Latinos less trusting of government (Abrajano and Alvarez 2010), although results are far from conclusive (see Schildkraut 2005). Much research remains to be done on this large and heterogeneous ethnoracial population.

We approach the study of Latino political distrust with an appreciation of histories of U.S. colonization, imperialism, and racialization. The state of the U.S. Latino population is inseparable from the longstanding, asymmetrical relationship between the United States and Latin American societies (Caban 2018; Martinez 2018; Gómez 2020). Beginning in the nineteenth century, Latin Americans and Latin American descendants who have come under the direct jurisdiction of the U.S. government have faced ethnoracial discrimination, including being targeted for exclusion by formal laws and policies (Montejano 1987; Almaguer 1994; Menchaca 2001). Restrictive housing covenants to keep Latinos out of white neighborhoods (Betancur 1996), policies that barred many Mexicans from attending school with white children (Foley 2006; Martinez-Cola 2022), and segregated public facilities (Montejano 1987) are all examples of state racism toward Latinos. While the civil rights movement rendered the use of such Jim Crow-style discrimination illegal, contemporary racism against Latinos manifests in the form of continuing issues with housing inequality, de facto Latino school segregation, police brutality, labor exploitation, and punitive immigration policies (Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Dowling and Inda 2013; Ochoa 2013; Armenta 2017; Valle 2019).

Still, the degree to which Latinos feel a sense of continued discrimination and exclusion from society is not uniform. To be certain, some differences in perception may follow structural differences, as well as differences in generation, phenotype, or class status (Vargas, Valle, and Dhuman 2025). Yet, while social positions or conditions may encourage certain perceptions and worldviews, they do not determine them. As noted, Latinos who inhabit similar positionalities may arrive at vastly different understandings of systemic inequalities (Ochoa 2004; Feagin and Cobas 2008). The diversity of the Latino community, which groups multiple national origins with a range of histories of colonization and migration, may further contribute to divergent worldviews despite a shared panethnic identity (Rodríguez-Muñiz 2010; Mora 2014). Even within national origin groups, shared histories do not always translate into shared perceptions of racism and inequality. For example, Dowling (2014) reports that Latinos with similar attributes and life experiences can still have very different stances regarding racism, with some adopting colorblind narratives and others espousing anti-racist ideology; in turn, these differences affected how her respondents viewed their racial positioning and their views on social justice and the government.

Taken together, the literature is clear: we cannot assume that Latinos with similar sociodemographic, spatial, and political characteristics will assess and anticipate governmental harm in the same way or to the same extent.

Data and Methods

Our study relies on qualitative interviews with Latino liberals and progressives during the “unsettled times” (Swidler 1986) of the first Trump administration. Although research on distrust has typically employed surveys, interviews are especially suitable for sensemaking because they capture how individuals rationalize their beliefs, make sense of the contradictions in their narratives (Swidler 2001), and provide insights into the role of emotions (Pugh 2013). Our 69 participants reside in two large metropolitan areas, Chicago (n = 34) and the San Francisco Bay Area (n = 35). We selected these sites because they share several characteristics: both are large, ethnoracially diverse areas with long histories of racial segregation, high levels of immigration, and vibrant ethnoracial politics. Both regions are politically liberal and have offered sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.

Again, our entire sample identified politically as non-Republican, and the vast majority tended to vote Democrat. This profile roughly resembles the partisan distribution of the chosen areas, since the Bay Area and Chicago, including their Latino populations, are highly Democratic (about 85% and 82%, respectively). Certainly, we could have chosen to interview Republican and conservative Latinos in these areas and compare them to their more Democrat-leaning counterparts. Such an analysis could prove illuminating, particularly in times of political and ideological polarization. However, we set out to analyze intra-partisan variation in the scope of political distrust, seeking to uncover and explain differences among politically similar respondents. We thus tailored our sample to achieve this analytical objective.

We recruited an otherwise very diverse sample of both U.S.-born and immigrant Latinos (see Figure 2). Men made up 32% of the sample (n = 22) and women 68% (n = 47). Respondents ranged in age from 18 to 72 years, with a mean age of 38.7 years. Interviewees were nearly evenly split between U.S.-born Latinos (n = 30) and immigrants who migrated here as adults (n = 31). The remaining 12% were 1.5-generation Latinos born abroad and arrived in the United States as children (n = 8). Thirty-three percent of respondents had graduated from college (n = 23), while another 25% (n = 17) had taken some college or other post-secondary courses but did not have a college degree (this segment includes respondents enrolled at local universities at the time of their interview). Twenty-six percent (n = 18) graduated from high school or obtained a GED, and 16% (n = 11) had not completed high school. About 74% of our interviewees were of Mexican origin, either alone or in combination with another Latino origin (n = 51). Five respondents identified as Puerto Rican. The sample also included five Central Americans and five South Americans, each set representing about 7% of interviewees. Finally, respondents worked in diverse occupations, including a cashier, TSA officer, tattoo artist, house cleaner, carpenter, teacher, and restaurant manager. Several were students, stay-at-home parents, or unemployed.

Figure 2: Sample Demographic Profile.

Interviews were conducted in 2019 and the first quarter of 2020. We recruited study participants through social media advertisements, organizational networks, and notices at major transportation hubs. Interviews were conducted in person by Latino interviewers in English or Spanish and averaged 1-2 hours. To capture the scope of trust and distrust, we asked respondents about a range of government actors and institutions at the federal, state, and municipal levels. We also asked about respondents’ views of or experiences with local police, immigration authorities, and the media. In addition, we prompted respondents to reflect on whether and how their political trust or distrust had changed over time, such as whether they trusted Obama or Bush more than Trump or distrusted their current governor more than past state administrations. We closed by exploring respondents’ plans to vote in 2020 and which political party and candidates they trusted more to support their interests. These expansive interviews went beyond the usual breadth of surveys and interviews to address multiple features and functions of U.S. statecraft.

Interview recordings were subsequently transcribed and analyzed in the following four phases. The first phase involved an initial round of open coding, in which each author inductively coded one-third of the transcriptions. During the second phase, we collectively reviewed our initial set of codes, compared notes, and discussed interpretive disagreements. In these initial two phases, we were attentive to the presence of emotions, particularly fear and anxiety. In addition, our codes sought to capture both the depth and range of the political sentiments and experiences respondents shared. In the third phase, we subjected our data to another round of collaborative coding, shifting from open to focused coding (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011). To aid this process, we created a spreadsheet to document the distribution of major themes across our interview pool. At this phase, it became clear that we had three distinct scopes of distrust. Our fourth analytic phase thus involved efforts to make sense of that divergence.

Our analysis, elaborated below, revealed that political distrust did not neatly map onto individual characteristics or experiences with local and federal government among our sample. Instead, there was a clear pattern: Each of the three scopes of distrust roughly corresponded to a specific way of interpreting and expecting governmental harm. In the following pages, we present our findings roughly in the order of our analytic process.

Findings

Discussion

Our study revealed considerable political distrust among our Chicago and San Francisco Bay Area respondents. In this sample of politically liberal and progressive Latinos, distrust was particularly pronounced toward the federal government and the Trump administration, which many described as “targeting” and “abandoning” their communities. Yet, distrust was not always limited to those parts of the political system. Other agents and aspects of government, from local police to state governments, were also seen as potential sources of harm and thus deemed worthy of distrust.

When we investigated further, we saw that political distrust was widespread but uneven. Some respondents expressed distrust about one or two political or governmental actors. Others voiced distrust for multiple parts of the government. Still others communicated sentiments of distrust that fell somewhere in between. As we have shown, there was limited evidence that the significant variation in the scope of political distrust we observed was consistently associated with demographic and socioeconomic differences in our sample. Nor did we find that negative encounters with the government directly fueled this variation. Instead, as the preceding section elaborates, this variation strongly corresponded with the particular racial state frames through which respondents interpreted and made sense of their experiences and expectations vis-à-vis government officials and state agencies (see Figure 3). The centrality of racial state frames was evident, for instance, in the fact that a figure as polarizing as Trump was not viewed in the same way, even by those politically opposed to him. Depending on the primary racial state frame employed, respondents variously depicted him as a racist “bad apple,” part of an exclusionary class of white elites, or as a manifestation of a systemically racist government.

Figure 3: Racial State Frames.

Although our data preclude strong causal claims, we conclude that these interpretive frames made the government, political officials, and state agencies meaningful in specific ways and shaped assessments about the nature and prospects of governmental harm. We found that particular frames were closely associated with specific scopes of political distrust among our interviewees. To restate, respondents with “narrow” distrust almost entirely adopted a “racist individual frame.” In contrast, those with “expansive” distrust overwhelmingly interpreted government actors and agencies through a “racist system” frame. In between these two sets of respondents, “moderate” distrusters interpreted governmental harm through a “racist bloc” frame. Our analysis thus suggests a strong relationship between particular scopes and racial state frames. Several additional points are worth highlighting. First, racial state frames not only rest on competing assumptions about the “racial” or “racist” nature of the government. They also contain a theory of change. Those who viewed the government through a racist individual frame spoke—albeit often implicitly—about two corrective methods. One involved removing racists from positions of authority through elections or dismissals. The other, typically raised with respect to “bad” police officers, was additional training. Other framers were generally less optimistic. Racist bloc framers, expectedly, posited elections or hiring greater numbers of Latinos and other people of color as the primary means to improve conditions. Those who espoused a racist system frame instead stressed the need for an institutional overhaul. Although many of them voted regularly and supported diversifying elected representatives, these respondents nonetheless expressed deep reservations about the effectiveness of demographic mechanisms of change.

Racial state frames were, therefore, both diagnostic and prescriptive. Notably, embedded theories of change also varied in concreteness, with the racist system frame being the least concrete. This finding resonates with complementary research showing that people often struggle to identify tangible solutions to systemic racism that go beyond individual-level interventions (see Dunbar and Holbrook 2023). Given the complexity of operationalizing social change, much less proving it politically viable, it is unsurprising that talk of systemic change was more vague.

A second point is that the racial state frames that were identified carried different temporal registers. As we have shown, respondents who viewed the government through a racist individual frame tended to talk about political racism in the present tense, mainly due to the rhetoric of then-President Trump. Recall, those respondents had narrow distrust and exhibited greater political trust, sentiments about Trump aside. Those using more systemic framing expressed a different temporal register. Racism in U.S. society and government was often seen by this group as a longstanding reality, neither temporary nor novel. Although their accounts were typically less historically grounded, respondents using the racist bloc frame also rejected the idea that exclusion from government positions was a new or specifically Trumpian phenomenon. In this way, respondents with a less individualist orientation were much more likely to engage in what Fleming (2017) calls “racial temporality,” that is, they linked rather than distanced present-day racism and historical state racism.

Finally, our findings complicate the literature on Latino political trust, especially regarding acculturation and distrust (Michelson 2003; Abrajano and Alvarez 2010). Second- and third-generation respondents were only slightly more likely to espouse expansive distrust. Thus, at least within our sample, the scope of distrust was not completely explained by acculturation. Given that we find that interpretative frames mediate between biographical factors and state encounters on the one hand and distrust on the other, our results encourage researchers to move beyond individual-level demographic measures and take perceived government racism and expectations of harm as potentially significant sources of variation in government trust and distrust among Latinos (and presumably other) populations. In short, attention to racial state frames, as we have done, promises to help uncover hitherto underappreciated aspects of U.S. Latino political distrust.

Conclusion

Building on sociological scholarship on the racial state (e.g., Jung and Kwon 2020; Pirtle 2023), growing interest in how publics “see the state” (e.g., Brissette 2016; Rodríguez-Muñiz 2017; Annavarapu and Levenson 2021), and cultural sociological work on frames (Young 2010; Feagin 2020), this article makes a significant theoretical contribution to scholarly conversations and research on race and political distrust. The concept of racial state frames directs attention to the frameworks through which individuals interpret experiential, vicarious, and discursive encounters with the government and assess the “racial” character and likelihood of future harm. Among our respondents, there was a strong association between specific frames and sentiments of distrust, including whether such sentiments span multiple government agencies or are limited to specific ones. This association, however, should not be taken as universal or permanent. We can imagine scenarios without the linkages we found. For instance, expansive distrust need not be associated with the racist system frame. An individual might distrust multiple governmental entities due to the perceived presence of individual racists rather than the outcome of institutional dynamics. Only further research will uncover whether there is an elective affinity between racial state frames and scopes of political distrust.

As noted above, we designed our study to explore such issues through a case study of respondents from a single minoritized population with relatively similar ideological profiles. This design made internal variation among co-ethnics and co-partisans visible. The result is a more nuanced portrait than possible through the conventional emphasis on the “racial trust gap” across broad populations (see Wilkes 2015; Bech 2023; Uribe et al. 2025). Yet, as we focused on liberal and progressive urban Latinos, further research is needed on Latinos in other contexts (e.g., rural) and with different political orientations. Based on past scholarship, we suspect that racial state frames and the scope of distrust among Latino conservatives would, especially under Republican administrations, differ significantly from those in our sample—not only due to partisanship but also to racial ideologies, more generally. Cadena, Jr. (2023), for instance, found that his Latino Republican respondents developed and embraced an “assimilated consciousness” predicated, in part, on the evasion and minimization of structural racism (see also Alamillo 2019). Yet, based on our study, we also anticipate variation among Latino conservatives, who may interpret the government through varied frames.

Future research could also go beyond the U.S. Latino population to examine the relationship between racial state frames and political distrust among other ethnoracial populations. Such work could uncover valuable patterns and parallels, as well as divergences, both regarding the cultural substance of the frames and their distribution within and across other minoritized populations and their respective partisan factions. One issue open for exploration is how distinct histories of government harm—genocide, chattel slavery, internment, military intervention, or colonization—influence the tenor, themes, and temporal depth of racial state frames. Another is how perceptions of the government relate to the scope of political distrust among those racialized as white. Scholars have uncovered increased sentiments of white “victimization” (see Jardina 2019; Filindra, Buyuker, and Kaplan 2023); it would be worthwhile to investigate variation in whether—and in what ways—whites perceive the government as having racial bias toward them, and how this correlates with variation in the scope of political distrust among members of this population. Equally important will be exploring those situations and contexts in which whites express anti-racist or race-neutral state frames.

The present article identifies three racial state frames circulating among our respondents, though we must remain open to the existence of additional racial state frames or hybrid frames. It is notable that few respondents, even among racist individual framers, consistently espoused what could be described as a colorblind racial state frame. We attribute this, at least in part, to the Trump administration’s explicitly white supremacist rhetoric and policies. As the politics of governmental power shift, the distribution of power across party lines in government will understandably remain a factor in how individuals assess the government and the prospects of governmental harm. As such, we need research during other presidential administrations and political moments. Here, it is important to note that, although the racial state frames we uncovered were closely associated with distrust, this need not be the case.

Our data also revealed other kinds of state frames and, at times, their intersectional articulation. Indeed, several respondents described the federal government as composed of “rich white men,” an assertion that evoked class and gender alongside race (see Mora, Dowling, Rodríguez 2021). We take such remarks as opportunities to investigate the role and resonance of gendered, classed, and intersectional state frames, among others. Such a research agenda might fruitfully examine how and under what conditions racial state frames intersect and overlap with other state frames, and how this contributes to—or is informed by—political distrust and trust.

Our exploration also invites questions about the origins and formation of racial state frames. Data from this study limit our ability to answer such questions. As previously noted, we understand racial state frames as more or less political distillations of broader societal racial conceptualizations, ideologies, and ignorances (Morning 2011; Mueller 2020; Bonilla-Silva 2022). For example, given the dominance of individualist accounts of racism in the United States (e.g., Sue and Lambert 2021; Henricks and Ortiz 2022), we are not surprised that some of our respondents understood certain politicians and certain police officers as “bad apples.” The racial state frames that respondents expressed and employed are part of the interpretive repertoires available to persons residing in a racialized social system such as the United States, where “racecraft” (Fields and Fields 2022) has been interwoven with statecraft from the beginning.

Another question for future research concerns the factors that might lead individuals to gravitate toward certain frames more than others. We believe more work is needed on “political socialization,” a concept that is today used more in political science than in sociology (Guhin, Calarco, and Miller-Idriss 2021). Along with schools and religious institutions, research has long held that parents play an influential role in the political socialization of children (e.g., Tyler and Iyengar 2023). This role is not limited to partisanship. Take, for example, research on the “police talk,” that is, the conversations Black parents have with their children about managing interactions with police to avoid violence (e.g., Malone Gonzalez 2019). Childhood political socialization is likely only part of the story. Political sociologists have become increasingly attentive to the work of “political articulation” that political parties—and, we would add, social movements—do to recruit individuals and constituencies to perceive state actors and the government in certain ways (e.g., de Leon, Desai, and Tuğal 2015). For example, some political projects encourage participants and members of the public to perceive a “racial state,” while others frame state actions as exercises of class domination or a patriarchal “man in the state” (Brown 1992). Such efforts, to be sure, rely heavily on media institutions, which themselves shape popular understandings of the government and its officials.

Moreover, given the strong association between racial state frames and understandings of state harm, future work might examine the relationship between such frames and political issues beyond trust, such as voting or civic action. Past research has found that political distrust can depress voting among minoritized populations (e.g., Schroedel et al. 2020). However, we do not know how racial state frames connect to, inform, or modulate this outcome.

Ultimately, this article takes seriously the role of racialized understandings and interpretations in political distrust. Our study highlights the need to both examine how minoritized people assess government untrustworthiness and consider the contingent linkages among expectations of governmental harm, political distrust, and racial state frames. This invitation, along with the extensions described above, will help develop more robust and sociologically grounded theories and empirical accounts of political distrust in racialized social and political systems.

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors and reviewers of Theory and Social Inquiry for their critical feedback. Our analysis also benefited from the comments of Jennifer Jones, Robert Vargas, and audiences at colloquia at Cornell University (Sociology), Georgetown University (Sociology), Notre Dame (Sociology), and the University of Washington-Seattle (Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race). A special thanks to Jonathan Xavier Inda for insightful engagement with the project. We are also grateful for feedback received at the 2020 American Sociological Association annual meeting, the NYU Latinx Project’s “Latinx Politics” virtual conference in 2021, and the Latin American Studies Association conference in 2026. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the research assistance of Oscar Cornejo, Yadira Herrera, Bianca Pérez, Reuben Pérez, Laura Pulido, Adriana Ramírez, Rachel Ramírez, Gabriel Rodríguez, Stephanie Ruizesparza, Evelyn Villanueva, and Paola Villegas.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.