Current research faces challenges in explaining how contextual factors account for variations in the rally effect in political trust during the COVID-19 pandemic. While systematic explanations of country-level differences are hard to establish by means of cross-sectional comparisons, we propose to compare subnational areas within a country to learn more about the role of contextual factors. In this research note, we argue that ethnic diversity is a crucial contextual factor that helps researchers understand differences in political trust at the onset of the pandemic. Specifically, we propose that the rally effect should be restricted to ethnically more homogeneous contexts. An analysis of geocoded household panel data from the Netherlands reveals a strong rally effect in ethnically homogenous areas, while political trust in ethnically diverse contexts appears not to respond to the pandemic. This suggests an entrenched geography of political trust, which is associated with ethnic divides and is even maintained under crisis.

There is growing concern about the impact of declining political trust on democracies. Psychological research has introduced the concept of epistemic (mis)trust as a stable disposition acquired through development, which may influence our sociopolitical engagement. Given trust’s prominence in current politics, we examined the relationship between epistemic trust and people’s choices of (un)trustworthy political leaders. In two representative samples in the UK and US (N = 1096), we tested whether epistemic trust predicts political leader choices through three political dimensions: dogmatism, political trust, and ideology. Although epistemic trust did not directly predict choices of political leaders, it predicted dogmatism and political ideology, which in turn predicted choices of political leaders. A network analysis revealed that epistemic trust and political dimensions only interact through their common connection with dogmatism. These findings suggest that cognitive and affective development may underlie an individual’s political ideology and associated beliefs.

How do electoral manipulation and resulting anti-fraud protests influence political trust in non-democratic contexts? I leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of a series of original surveys fielded on nationally representative samples in Russia to understand the impact of political shocks – particularly allegations of electoral fraud and post-election protests – on the evolution of trust in political institutions and individuals. This study demonstrates that allegations of excessive, blatant electoral fraud decrease trust in the autocrat. However, trust rebounds following attendant post-election protests. Finally, I examine the conditional impacts of fraud and protest on trust, finding that updating occurs primarily among those with weak political affiliation.

Previous research has examined whether voters will punish candidates who engage in sexual harassment in national-level elections, revealing partisanship as a strong predictor of electoral punishment. Using original survey data, we evaluate whether the public supports a broader range of sanctions (e.g. apologies, training, and removal from office) that legislatures can impose upon politicians who perpetrate sexual harassment in Canada’s municipalities, a non-partisan context. In the absence of partisan-based motivated reasoning, we find that women are more likely than men to support the removal from office of a councillor who engages in sexual harassment. Respondents who do not believe that sexism is a problem and are skeptical about claims of gender-based violence are also less likely to support punishment in these cases. These findings have relevance for democratic institutions, revealing that sanctions imposed on politicians who perpetrate sexual harassment can help maintain political accountability and restore public trust.

During the last decades, political distrust has seemingly become a common trend across Latin American democracies, however, differences in the levels of confidence among groups have also been identified. This article considers the potential effects of ethno-racial structures and their interactions with other forms of socioeconomic inequalities on political trust. Building on data from four waves of the Latinobarometer project and contextual measures from different sources, we analyze these relations and find that both socioeconomic and ethno-racial inequalities affect political trust and impact on the formation of different relations with the political system across Latin America. Furthermore, in particular it is found that at the individual-level interactions between inequalities shape political trust differently depending on the particular ethno-racial identification. These findings contribute to the understanding of ethnicity and race and its associations with other structural inequalities in shaping mass political culture.

Mainstream parties have taken increasingly restrictive immigration policy positions across Western Europe. Yet the political consequences of this behaviour for citizens' democratic norms and practices are still not well understood. This article focuses on public political trust. Bridging the literatures on immigration-related trust and spatial theory, the spotlight is put on the consequences of mainstream party position-taking on immigration for the interconnectedness of citizens' immigration policy preferences, political distrust and far-right voting. An analysis of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and European Social Survey across 14 Western European democracies (2006–2018) suggests that tougher immigration positions of centre-right parties in government weaken the link between immigration scepticism and political distrust and, in turn, the relevance of political distrust as a precursor of far-right voting. This has important implications for our understanding of immigration politics and advances the existing literatures on party competition, political trust and far-right voting in several ways.

How do citizens react to repeated losses in politics? This paper argues that experiencing accumulated losses creates strong incentives to externalize responsibility for these losses to the decision-making procedure, which can, in turn, erode legitimacy perceptions among the public. Using a survey experiment (N = 2,146) simulating accumulated losses in a series of direct votes among Irish citizens, we find that decision acceptance and the perceived legitimacy of the decision-making procedure diminish with every loss. Three accumulated losses depress the perceived legitimacy of the political system. These effects are mediated by procedural fairness perceptions, suggesting that even when democratic procedures are used, accumulated losses can induce a belief that the process and system are rigged.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

Emerging health crises challenge and overwhelm federal political systems (Greer et al. 2020, Global Public Health 15: 1413–6). Within the context of COVID-19, states and governors took charge in the absence of a coordinated federal response. The result was uneven policy responses and variance in health-related and economic outcomes. While existing research has explored public evaluations of state COVID-19 policies, we explore primary care physicians’ trust in state government for handling the pandemic, as well as their evaluations of their state government’s treatment responsibility for the pandemic and their state’s policy response. We find that general preferences for the role of the federal/state government in addressing the pandemic are shaped by individual-level physician partisanship. Specific evaluations of state policy responsiveness are influenced by whether physicians’ partisan preferences matched their governor. We also find, however, that Republican physicians were critical of Republican governors and physicians were less partisan than the general public. At least within public health, there are limits to the influence of partisan identity on expert (physician) political evaluations.

The extent in which voters from different ideological viewpoints support state interventions to curb crises remains an outstanding conundrum, marred by conflicting evidence. In this article, we test two possible ways out from such puzzle. The role of ideology to explain support for state interventions, we argue, could be (i) conditional upon the ideological nature of the crisis itself (e.g., whether the crisis relates to conservation vs. post-materialist values), or (ii) unfolding indirectly, by moderating the role played by political trust. We present evidence from a conjoint experiment fielded in 2022 on a representative sample of 1,000 Italian citizens, in which respondents were asked whether they support specific governmental interventions to curb a crisis, described under different conditions (e.g., type of crisis, severity). Our results show that the type of crisis matters marginally – right-wing respondents were more likely to support state interventions only in the case of terrorism. More fundamentally, political trust affects the probability to support state interventions, but only for right-wing citizens.

Before the Omicron variant ran amok inside China in November 2022, the Chinese central government’s dynamic zero-COVID policy effectively contained the spread of the coronavirus and its variants during multiple waves of outbreaks. However, it was not without cost. This study examines the impacts of stringent lockdown interventions on urban residents’ mental health during the initial outbreak of the Omicron variant in the spring of 2022. Using survey data from 522 respondents within the same neighbourhood and a spatial quasi-experimental design, the results show that strict lockdown interventions are significantly related to higher levels of psychological distress after controlling for observed confounders and that lockdown interventions have further spillover effects on mental health for residents in adjacent residential compounds who are otherwise free. Moreover, the results show that the lack of material supplies and medical care plays a more salient role in explaining lockdown effects on psychological distress than residents’ social interaction and trust levels of COVID-19 policy. Policy and intervention implications are also discussed.

How do cities foster political trust among informal workers? This question is particularly salient in Africa's growing cities where local governments must reconcile policy priorities across highly heterogeneous constituencies, including a burgeoning middle-class and a large informal economy. We argue that expectations about reciprocity and procedural justice shape the probability that informal traders trust their local government. In doing so, we analyse a survey of approximately 1000 informal traders in Ghana's three main cities – Accra, Kumasi and Tamale. We find that traders who paid requisite fees to local assemblies and could attribute a benefit from those payments were more likely to trust their local government while those who had experienced harassment by city authorities were less likely to do so. The paper highlights that drivers of trust among diverse urban constituencies deserve greater empirical and comparative attention, especially as countries deepen decentralisation initiatives and cities commit to development goals around inclusivity.

Citizens are more trustful of politics if their preferred party is an electoral winner and becomes part of the government. However, there remains the question of whether this positive effect of joining the government also holds for supporters of populist parties. Populists show low levels of political trust, as they strongly criticize the political elite. This study argues that voters of populist parties perceive the political system as more responsive to their concerns when their preferred party becomes part of the government and so they become more trustful of politics. Drawing on the case of Austria, the analyses demonstrate that political trust among populist party voters is higher when their party is in government. In contrast, non-populist voters' level of political trust is more stable, even when their party is not in government.

Government competence in delivering outcomes is often regarded as foundational to political trust. However, in this article, a different competence dynamic is proposed; specifically, whether political trust is related to government efficiency in achieving promised policy objectives. This article argues that when policy objectives are polarizing, the effect of efficiency on political trust is conditional on whether individuals support or oppose the objective. Using the case of Brexit, where the promised policy objective of leaving the European Union was polarizing, it is hypothesized that Leave voters relative to Remain voters became more trusting in cases of efficiency and less trusting in cases of inefficiency. The predictions are supported through a difference-in-differences analysis of unique real-world data over time from the British Election Study. The findings have important implications for our understanding of Brexit and also inform how political trust relates to government competence in the case of polarizing political issues.

Could an individual’s perception of the possibility of a future ecological crisis be linked to their level of political trust? Studies of environmental attitudes have identified political trust as an important predictor of support for environmental taxation or risk perceptions surrounding specific local environmental hazards, but less is known about its role when environmental risks are perceived as diffuse and distant. Using original survey data from Ecuador, this article finds that political distrust predicts heightened ecological crisis perceptions and that higher educational attainment intensifies this relationship. A follow-up analysis of the AmericasBarometer’s Ecuador survey shows that political distrust also predicts higher concern about climate change. These findings suggest that when evaluations of political institutions reflect perceptions of environmental risks, individuals blame the government for environmental failures. The implications of this study are particularly relevant for political institutions in developing economies, where the public sector often spearheads development efforts.

How are immigrants’ feelings of inclusion and trust in political institutions affected by interactions with the host society? In a field dominated by observational correlation studies, I use a survey experiment in two national contexts to test how perceptions of discrimination and expressions of pro-immigrant support influence non-Western immigrants’ political trust and national belonging. Following standard experimental procedures to test the hypotheses, I attempt to prime perceptions of group discrimination by asking questions about unfair treatment. Expressions of pro-immigrant support are, in turn, primed with facts about public and institutional support for immigrants’ rights. The results from the survey experiment are in line with expectations from prior work in some subgroups and underline the importance of equal treatment to achieve social cohesion. They also paint a rather complex picture of discrimination and its psychological impact. These findings have substantial implications for our understanding of host societies’ roles in immigrant inclusion.

This original analysis of the World Values Survey waves of 2007, 2012 and 2018 reveals important relationships among political trust and satisfaction, happiness, views of corruption, local elections and activism from the last half of the Hu Jintao administration through the first five years of Xi Jinping's rule. These data shed new light on the deeper dynamics underlying the high and growing levels of trust in government documented in other studies. Among this report's more novel findings, we find increased trust in government coincides with decreased local electoral participation, suggesting that participation in local elections is not key to perceptions of regime legitimacy. Views of corruption and a sense of personal efficacy through non-institutionalized forms of political participation such as peaceful demonstrations appear more relevant. Thus, constraints on people's ability to engage in peaceful demonstrations are likely to negatively impact views of regime legitimacy. In addition, the report uncovers demographic variations in these dynamics, indicating that regime legitimacy is more precarious among citizens at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and among younger Chinese. Overall, these findings complicate existing explanations of regime legitimacy centring on economic performance, nationalism, responsiveness/adaptiveness and efforts to combat corruption.

China's involvement in the world and its economic modernization are expected to lead to its democratization and adherence to the liberal international order. However, after several decades of development, the authoritarian system remains resilient, and China's foreign policy appears to be more assertive. The limited nature of scholarship on the public opinion in a rising power has prevented a better understanding of China's domestic changes and foreign policy. This study seeks to unveil the micro-foundations of the unexpected trajectory of China's rise by investigating the public's national and international orientations using nationwide representative survey data. The results show that international orientations had a very limited effect on Chinese popular attitudes toward domestic politics and foreign relations, while national orientations strengthened public support for the authoritarian system and China's assertive foreign policy. Intergenerational variations existed in public opinion in China, with the Xi generation showing a different pattern of political values than the preceding generations.

Political trust matters for citizens’ policy preferences but existing research has not fully understood how this effect depends on policy design. To advance this research area, we theorise that policy controls that limit or condition policy provision can function as safeguards against uncertainty, thereby compensating for a person’s lack of trust in generating support. Focusing on public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, we conduct an original conjoint experiment in eight European countries. We find that individuals with lower levels of trust in European political institutions are less supportive of policies providing unlimited or unconditional protection and more supportive of restrictive policies. We also show that policy design features such as limits and conditions can mitigate perceived uncertainty for individuals who are less trusting in European political institutions. These findings have important implications for the theoretical understanding of how political trust pertains to citizens’ preferences.