Trust, Distrust and Politicians’ Decision-Making in Risky Situations.

Despite the existence of a large literature attesting to the importance of public trust, distrust and mistrust in political actors, it is possible to argue that very little research, if any, has focused upon how trusted or distrusted politicians feel. In turn, we remain strikingly ignorant about how the existence of a low-trust, high-blame environment may affect decision-making processes and the quality of public governance. This paper will tackle this gap by analysing a unique quantitative dataset gathered from over 200 elected representatives in comparative national legislatures (data collection ongoing). This dataset is used to (1) examine descriptive levels of felt trust and distrust among politicians, (2) explore how these feelings vary across and within countries by party, gender and other salient individual characteristics, and (3) evaluate the impact of these feelings on politicians’ decision-efficacy. To achieve outcome (3), this paper will present the results of three survey experiments in which politicians were asked to make policy decisions in scenarios of varying risk. It is anticipated that politicians with high levels of felt trust and low levels of felt distrust will be more likely to make risky decisions and have more confidence in those decisions than politicians with low levels of felt trust and high levels of felt distrust. These hypotheses are expected to hold even where experimental treatments deliberately stimulate loss aversion. These analyses crystallise a number of scholarly contributions to the extant study of political trust, whilst producing practical recommendations for improving governor-governed relations.