In order to understand the relevance of class politics and the changing composition of our politicians, we must first understand how the public derive their views of social class and, importantly, that of their elected representatives. If the social class of representatives is to matter, the public must be able to at least partly accurately infer the social class of representatives. This article addresses that question through a large conjoint experiment conducted in Britain (N = 4157). In addition to a wide range of social class cues, participants were randomly exposed to distinct information conditions where statements about the hypothetical profiles under consideration were of individuals with political experience or not. The findings reveal meaningful differences in how social class markers are perceived between Members of Parliament (MPs) and the general public. Notably, MPs are consistently viewed as less working class, even when they possess identical working-class attributes to an average member of the public. These results have implications for understanding how people derive the social class of others, especially elected representatives. The latter is important: the perceptual gap underscores a fundamental dilemma for the promotion of working-class representation in politics as working-class MPs are likely to struggle to be recognised as authentic representatives of the class groups they descriptively represent.

Social democratic parties have increasingly adopted restrictive immigration rhetoric in response to radical right challengers’ electoral successes. The consequences of accommodation remain contested. This paper leverages a pre-registered quasi-experimental design exploiting within-individual variation from as-good-as-random exposure to UK Labour leader Keir Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech – a major rhetorical turn toward anti-immigration positions. We find that the speech altered aggregate perceptions of Labour’s position on immigration and increased the salience of the issue, but was unsuccessful in boosting support for Labour. Instead, the anti-immigration rhetoric yielded no significant increase in Labour support, significantly reduced Starmer’s personal favorability, and there is suggestive evidence that it benefited the radical right party Reform UK. These findings indicate that social democratic parties may have more to lose than to gain by contesting elections on the terrain of their radical right competitors.

The article establishes the concept of policy fatalism, defined as the view that some societal issues are so intractable that no policy measures can be effectively taken to resolve them. It does so by distinguishing it from other well-known concepts and demarcating policy fatalism as a concept in contrast with a focus on personal fatalism applied in other studies. The concept finds empirical support through representative surveys in Britain and Australia that show a high proportion of people in both countries are fatalistic about the prospects for dealing with climate change but also for securing homeownership for future generations and avoiding economic slumps. We test for a range of correlates of policy fatalism, finding that those with lower formal education and those on the ideological right are more fatalistic, as are those that trust traditional media. Those expressing personal fatalism about their lives are not more fatalistic over policy. Exploring the consequences, we find that policy fatalism leads to greater disenchantment with democratic rule yet does not inspire greater personal action. We argue that policy fatalism is distinct from established concepts and connects policy studies to wider debates about a trend towards fatalism in society and its role in politics.

What traits do the public prioritise when it comes to trusting political leaders during crises, and are these expectations gendered? While prior research has examined gender biases in political leadership, especially in masculine-coded crises like security or defence, less attention has been paid to how different crisis types shape preferences for gendered leadership traits. Drawing on a UK-based survey experiment, we examine which traits the public value in trustworthy politicians across health, security, and economic crises. We find that while honesty is a universally prioritised trustworthy trait, broader trait preferences are moderated by the type of crisis and respondent gender. Although feminine traits are preferred across the board, security crises elicit relatively stronger preferences for traditionally masculine traits than other crisis types, although only among men. Conversely, health crises amplify support for feminine traits, although only among women. These findings highlight how crisis contexts activate gendered expectations of leadership, revealing that what the public wants from politicians shifts with both the nature of the crisis and the gender of the voter.

In post-imperial European states, debates about imperial legacies - centred on issues such as colonial statues, police treatment of minorities, and school curricula - have intensified in recent years. Yet little systematic research examines public attitudes towards empire or their political impact. We develop a framework linking imperial nostalgia with political preferences and present findings from Britain using a national survey and conjoint experiment. First, we identify a distinct public opinion dimension on empire, ranging from nostalgic to critical. Second, we show that imperial nostalgia strongly predicts party evaluations and vote intentions, with effects comparable to those of immigration attitudes and left-right economic values. Finally, a conjoint experiment reveals that elite positions on empire influence voter preferences, but do so asymmetrically: right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support. These findings underscore the contemporary political relevance of imperial nostalgia in post-imperial Europe.

The working class are poorly represented in democratic institutions across the world, despite substantial evidence that the public do not discriminate against working-class candidates and view them more positively across numerous character traits. We propose a novel explanation: a pragmatism bias where working-class individuals are perceived as less likely to achieve political success. We provide experimental evidence that this bias may operate at multiple stages of the political process. We go beyond existing work by using a multidimensional operationalization of class to show that contemporary class has the largest effects on perceived chances of political success. Finally, we show that this cannot be remedied by social mobility, and high-income individuals are more likely to display this belief.

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.

What drives the link between university study and attitudinal change? While research shows that obtaining a degree tends to make students more socially liberal, little is known about what drives this effect. We address this ‘how’ question by testing the socialisation-based mechanisms through which university study may shift attitudes; combining individual-level panel data from the British Election Study Internet Panel with university- and constituency-level data about where respondents studied to estimate sub-group effects. Our results suggest that students tend to shift their attitudes subtly in a leftward and liberal direction whilst at university, but that this average effect is larger for: those who graduate younger, who study STEM and other non-HSS subjects (social attitudes only), who move away from home to study, who attend single campus institutions, and who live in ‘university towns’ and ‘cosmopolitan London’ while studying (all economic attitudes only). Overall, we find evidence to suggest that the socialisation experiences individuals are exposed to while studying have important shaping effects on their attitudes.

Disaffection with democratic politics is becoming the norm and its causes more varied. Empirical work on political trust, however, almost always relies on blunt survey items measuring only ‘trust’, but it is unknown whether this adequately captures diverse trust attitudes. In this paper, we propose a tripartite distinction between trust, distrust, and mistrust. Empirically, we draw on original data from 13 surveys across 11 countries and 52 focus groups involving 311 participants in eight countries to design and test survey items to distinguish between these trust orientations. We show that they are indeed distinct among the public. We find that 20-40% of the public report no coherent trust attitude and ‘trust’ is a minority positions in all countries studied. We go on to document the socio-demographic profiles of those likely to hold these positions. Our analysis provides a new empirical and conceptual framework for exploring political trust and its absence.

Trust in political actors and institutions has long been seen as essential for effective democratic governance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust was widely identified as key for mitigation of the crisis through its influence on compliance with public policy, vaccination and many other social attitudes and behaviours. We study whether trust did indeed predict these outcomes through a meta-analysis of 67 studies and 426 individual effect sizes derived from nearly 1.5 million observations worldwide. Political trust as an explanatory variable has small to moderate correlations with outcomes such as vaccine uptake, belief in conspiracy theories, and compliance. These correlations are heterogenous, and we show that trust in health authorities is more strongly related to vaccination than trust in the government; but compliance is more strongly related to the government than other institutions. Moreover, the unique case of the United States indicates that trust in President Trump had negative effects across all observed outcomes, except in increasing conspiracy beliefs. Our analysis also shows that research design features (such as response scales) and publication bias do not importantly change the results. These results indicate that trust was important for the management of the pandemic and supports existing work highlighting the importance of political trust.

We explore the characteristics of politicians that make them trusted by citizens, fielding conjoint survey experiments in seven democracies. Studies regularly indicate that competence and integrity are key attributes in the perceived trustworthiness of politicians, but we show that displaying authenticity is also important. Authenticity is about being true to oneself, and in the political context this requires politicians to appear unlike typical politicians and more like ordinary people. We find that some attributes associated with authenticity are as important as competence and integrity, and they appear to be especially important to citizens with lower levels of generalized political trust. These findings suggest that considerations of politicians being ‘in touch with ordinary people’ can matter just as much as more traditional judgements of their honesty and ability to produce outcomes. This has implications for our understanding of political leadership as well as for trust-building strategies.

How does political trust influence policy preferences? A large literature posits that trust is vital for supporting governments in managing fundamental societal challenges and investing in long-term policy making. This paper investigates the relationship between political trust and policy preferences, specifically redistribution preferences. Through four pre-registered, original survey experiments conducted over two years in the UK and long-term panel data spanning 19 years in Switzerland, I demonstrate that political trust has an insignificant and negligible impact on individuals’ preferences for redistribution, even when trust is experimentally manipulated under theoretically favourable conditions. By combining two designs with improved causal identification than the existing literature, these results challenge prevailing theories linking political trust and policy preferences and highlight the need for further examination of the complex dynamics between citizens’ attitudes and support for government policy.

Political trust has long been seen as fundamental for societal cooperation and democratic legitimacy. However, evidence about its consequences are partial and fragmented, and we do not currently have a systematic understanding of whether political trust warrants such vast attention. This paper conducts a systematic review and meta-analysis of 61 studies reporting 329 coefficients derived from over three and a half million observations globally. After synthesising the conceptual and theoretical frameworks in the extant literature, the meta-analysis results show that trust is weakly to moderately related to outcomes as diverse as voter turnout, vote choice, policy preferences and compliance, but is unrelated to informal participation. These results are robust to a range of considerations such as the measurement of trust, modelling strategy, region of study, publication bias, and design of the study. The review also highlights substantial geographical and methodological gaps, particularly the reliance on cross-sectional designs. Substantively, the results show that trust is importantly and robustly related to what people want from their political systems and how they interact with it. By systematically analysing the extant research, the paper provides a robust, systematic, and empirical foundation to advance research on political trust.

This paper examines the qualities of governments that influence their perceived trustworthiness, presenting the first experimental study of the distinct roles of 'competence', 'benevolence' and 'integrity' (CBI) in shaping trust in government. We empirically test the effects of these three dimensions of trustworthiness through conjoint experiments conducted in five countries: Britain, Croatia, Spain, Argentina and France. The results indicate that benevolence - government acting in citizens' interests - is the most significant determinant of trust judgements across individuals and nations. Competence and integrity have a secondary, approximately equal effect. Building on recent advances in analyses of conjoint experiments, we explore how these attributes are conditional on each other, and how respondent characteristics moderate those effects. The findings reveal that the effects of attributes are generally consistent, although respondent left-right ideology moderates the impact of government competence.

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.

A quirk of the Westminster system is that Ministers invariably have to "learn on the job". Yet "learning" has been surprisingly understudied in work on executive government in Britain especially. In this paper, we offer a systematic account of Ministerial learning based on a comprehensive analysis of the Ministers Reflect archive-the largest dataset of research interviews with former Westminster ministers ever assembled. We identify six distinct learning styles-incremental, risk-averse, managerial, creative, instrumental and instinctive-and assess the implications for how Ministers adjust to the challenges of high political office. We conclude by showing what an appreciation for this variety of Ministerial learning styles can offer the study and practice of executive government in Britain and beyond.

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science, and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long-standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility, and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within-individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long-term, with potential for short-term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people’s formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people’s responses to trust questions are remark- ably similar between surveys, and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these ap- pear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redis- tribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and of attitude formation more broadly.