Feelings of Trust, Distrust and Risky Decision-Making in Political Office. An Experimental Study With National Politicians in Three Democracies

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221139376
• Author: James Weinberg
• Date: 01 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(7) 935–967

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221139376

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Feelings of Trust,

Distrust and Risky

Decision-Making in

Political Off‌ice. An

Experimental Study With

National Politicians in

Three Democracies

James Weinberg

1



Abstract

Tackling an important gap in the literature on political trust, this article fo-

cuses on politicians and the relevance of their other-to-self trust judgements

for decision-making in public off‌ice. A unique quantitative dataset gathered

from national politicians in the UK, Canada and South Africa is used to (1)

examine descriptive levels of felt trust and distrust among politicians and (2)

evaluate the impact of these feelings on politicians’risky decision-making. To

achieve outcome (2), this article presents the results of three survey ex-

periments in which politicians were asked to make decisions in scenarios

where both the presentation and the nature of risk varied. The results indicate

that MPs’perceptions of public trust and distrust do matter for risky decision-

making, and that these variables moderate a ref‌lection effect whereby MPs are

otherwise more risk-averse in the face of gains and risk-taking in the face of

losses.

1

University of Sheff‌ield, Sheff‌ield, UK

Corresponding Author:

James Weinberg, The Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheff‌ield,

Elmf‌ield Building, Sheff‌ield S10 2TN, UK.

Email: james.weinberg@sheff‌ield.ac.uk

Keywords

risk, trust, distrust, decision-making, ref‌lection effect, politicians, heuristic

Introduction

Despite the existence of an expansive literature attesting to the importance of

political trust for public opinion, participation and policy compliance (for a

detailed review, see Citrin & Stoker,2018 ), it is astonishing that so little of it, if

any, has focused upon how the existence of a low-trust, high-blame envi-

ronment affects politicians’decision-making and thus the quality of public

governance. Given that political trust is routinely understood as a relational

concept involving both citizens (the ‘trustors’) and politicians (the ‘trustees’),

it is somewhat remarkable that there remains no knowledge of if or how the

latter interpret and act upon political trust. These questions represent a missing

piece in the trust puzzle as studied in political science and cognate disciplines.

Tackling this gap head on, I take a novel dialogic approach to vertical trust-

based relationships that gives equal weight to politicians’feelings of being

trusted and distrusted within the principal-agent relationship that characterises

representative democracies.

1

In this article, I focus on one particularly sig-

nif‌icant dimension of this research agenda: when, why and how these feelings

might inf‌luence politicians’risky decision-making. Risk is, of course, endemic

to political life. By virtue of their off‌ice, politicians must constantly make

decisions with very real and consequential personal and public risks attached.

In turn, risks per se are interwoven with the psychological fabric of trust and

distrust, which together represent an evolutionary response to ontological

vulnerability and uncertainty (see Cai et al., 2020;Mackenzie, 2020).

However, research on the trust-risk relationship has thus far overlooked an

important question: do politicians’perceptions of public trust or distrust in

themselves impact their propensity to engage in risk-seeking or risk-averse

behaviours? To theorise this link more precisely, I draw on the trust-as-

heuristic tradition (see Hetherington, 2005;Rudolph, 2017), which takes

political trust as a decision rule that assists citizens as they decide whether or

not to support government action. Specif‌ically, I f‌lip this logic 180° to suggest

that f‌luid and variegated perceptions of public trust and distrust act as a

heuristic for politicians who not only occupy a job laden with risk but exist in

an overwhelmingly complex informational environment (for a discussion of

elites’use of heuristics, see Vis, 2019).

In this article, I propose and test this thesis for the f‌irst time using original

survey measures and experiments administered to more than 100 nationally

elected politicians drawn from three major democracies (the UK, Canada and

South Africa). I examine the relationship between politicians’perceptions of

public [dis]trust and their decisions in scenarios where the nature and

936 Comparative Political Studies 56(7)

presentation of risk differs. I f‌ind preliminary evidence that MPs’perceptions

of public trust and distrust do matter for risky decision-making, and that these

variables moderate a ref‌lection effect whereby MPs are otherwise more risk-

averse in the face of gains and risk-taking in the face of losses. The con-

tribution of this article is three-fold. Theoretically, I advance existing work on

trust and governance by demonstrating the importance of politicians’other-to-

self perceptions of trust-related concepts. Methodologically, I add to a small

but important research base that has used experimental methods with political

elites (for a review, see Kertzer & Renshon, 2022) and I test a new battery of

‘felt’trust and distrust with politicians in comparative contexts. Empirically, I

use these methods to show that MPs are not only susceptible to well-

researched biases in some risk-laden scenarios, but that these cognitive

shortcuts can interact with [seemingly inaccurate] appraisals of public opinion

to help MPs reach behavioural decisions in the presence of uncertainty.

What Does it Mean to be Trusted and Why Does it Matter?

As an essentially contested concept, there continues to be f‌ierce debate about

whether political trust is a unidimensional, holistically conceived attitude (e.g.

Hetherington & Rudolph, 2008;Hooghe, 2011) or whether it is, as David

Chan (2019, p. 3) argues, decidedly multi-level, multi-dimensional and mal-

leable. The formerinterpretation has tended to dominatea relatively traditional

and longstandingapproach to the measurement oftrust in mass surveys such as

the American National Election Study (ANES), the General Social Survey

(GSS) and Gallup,whilst the latter has informeda more nuanced, target-specif‌ic

study of trust and distrust across politics as well as the organisational and

psychological sciences (Devine et al., 2020;Hamm et al., 2019). Whilst it is

neither necessary norpossible to explore this theoretical debate in detailin this

article, it is worthclarifying my position by way of foregrounding later remarks.

I distinguish here between trust as an action (decisions or behaviours) and

trust as a series of internalised psychological processes that inform those

actions. This approach relies on a number of core assumptions: trust in all

forms is relational, it depends upon reciprocal multi-faceted judgements about

trustor and trustee, and it is interrelated to but distinguishable from distrust. On

the f‌irst point, scholars such as Peter Nannestad (2008, p. 417) and Russell

Hardin (2002) have advanced a sound understanding of trust as a ‘three-way

relationship…where A trusts some specif‌ic B with respect to some specif‌icx’.

The important takeaway here is that trust must be conceived as something that

is target-specif‌ic and granted contingently within a context-specif‌ic domain of

action. On the second point, the contingencies implicit in this relational model

are resolved by trust judgements about the trustworthiness of another. To be

precise, people make cognitive, affective and behavioural-intentional

judgements about potential trustees (e.g., about their ability, benevolence

Weinberg 937