Politicians may be feverishly campaigning for votes, but fewer and fewer citizens say they trust them and the institutions they inhabit. In this post, Ben Seyd considers what politicians can do to strengthen the public’s confidence in their work. He suggests that trust may not be responsive to the expectations that people have of politicians; instead, trust seems more affected by perceptions of how well politicians are seen to perform. Boosting the public’s trust might therefore require improving political performance rather than simply limiting what the public expects of its elected representatives.
Everyone is focusing right now on the parties’ election fortunes, and who will take power after 7th May. But look beyond people’s electoral choices to their views on politicians and political institutions, and the results are not pretty. The latest figures from the British Social Attitudes survey show that fully one third (32 per cent) of the British population profess to ‘almost never’ trusting government, three times the level recorded in 1986. Over the same period, the proportion of citizens saying they trust government ‘just about always’ or ‘most of the time’ has halved, from 38 per cent to 17 per cent. This weakening of political trust is of concern to politicians, who understandably feel uncomfortable faced with such a harsh public judgement. But low trust in politicians and political institutions also has wider, and more serious, effects. We know from recent research, for instance, that people who distrust government are twice as likely as those who trust government to accept law-breaking behaviour such as tax and benefit fraud. Low trust is thus detrimental to effective government.
The causes of low political trust are complex, and have been touched on in previous articles on the Democratic Audit blog, such as here and here. But what about solutions? Might one road to greater trust lie in politicians limiting what the public expects of them? After all, two people might form very different views on an object (a specific object such as a shopping purchase, or a broader set of actors like politicians) depending not only on the quality or performance of that object, but also on what quality or performance was expected. Indeed, research suggests that people’s satisfaction with government is shaped by perceptions of how well government performs relative to what is expected of it. If this line of research – most of which has been conducted in the US – is correct, then politicians in the UK concerned by low levels of trust might wish to dampen down claims about what they will achieve in the hopes of limiting what the public expects of them.
However, in research just published, I cast doubt on whether expectations are quite as significant in shaping levels of political trust. The research draws on a survey which asked British citizens about various standards of behaviour among politicians, such as owning up to mistakes, spending public money wisely and setting a good example in their private lives. Asked how important each of these behaviours was, the public not surprisingly deemed all of them to be important (although less so in the case of politicians’ private lives). Then asked how many politicians actually meet these standards, the public’s judgement is often far more negative. So expectations are high, and performance is often seen to fall short of the desired standards. No surprises yet.
The key test, though, was to see how far political trust is responsive to assessments of politicians’ performance alone, or rather to assessments of performance relative to people’s expectations. Here, in a variety of tests, a consistent picture emerged: while expectations matter for trust, what matters even more are people’s perceptions of performance (in this case, standards of political conduct). Even when we focus on people who hold very different expectations of politicians – those who judge the behaviour to be very important as opposed to less important – we find that assessments of performance have a greater effect on political trust than expectations. The research suggests that people’s trust in politicians appears primarily to reflect how well they judge those politicians to have performed, rather than how that performance relates to prior expectations.
This is not to suggest that expectations do not matter for the way people view politicians and political institutions. They clearly do. But they may matter rather less than perceptions of what politicians have actually done or what they have actually delivered. Politicians concerned to boost their public image may therefore find that managing public expectations – by limiting what voters expect of them – may have rather little impact on levels of trust. Not that politicians, faced with a tight election, show any sign of offering more cautious and realistic promises, anyway.
Note: This article was originally published on the Democratic Audit blog and gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting. Featured image credit: Megan Trace, CC BY NC 2.0
Dr Ben Seyd teaches politics at the University of Kent. He is currently writing a book about political trust. The research paper on which this post is based is freely available for download here.
The public may well see two great Powers with a continuous drive to Abuse those same Powers – it could be said that both the Political class and news media are those Powers.
With such Powers, the public may well be disillusioned at how it is that they failed to discuss the viable small business and those bold people who started them up, the homes that were taken from said people as a direct result of such failings, the psychological strains amid an economical one has never been a topic of debate raised by the media in order to hold politicians and MPs to account. Why is this?
If productivity is the key to enhancing business and employment growth, surely such discussion and meaningful debate is viable in a climate that continues to show its strains even when the political class say otherwise. Hence, the lack of trust with politicians, many may suggest, is also at one with the lack of trust for our news media whose amnesia – or purpose failure to harness such real Voices – has benefitted the political class while ignoring those who remain desperate to have their Voices heard and to improve their social mobility once again.
Finally, the fact that the political class has won over the media – in that it has chosen the NHS to be the biggest topic of agenda – has to be the biggest failure of all times to improve cohesion between politicians and the public. Why? The NHS should never be used as a political football, but, yet, is has been allowed to become this.. again and again. Is it not clear that an independent body should be set-up to run the finances of the NHS like a business – as it is. Thus, putting in place managers who feet are firmly placed on the ground – where possible – and developing BEST practices. If this was done, politicians would have to start talking about REAL failings, real challenges and real social mobility aspirations of real folk! Instead, they are not!
The news media has done very little, if anything, to have regular spots for community leaders, those failed by policy, volunteers… etc and to have their voices heard in respect of newspaper stories or local stories. Time and time again, we only see senior political or newspaper figures in the limelight to respond to newspaper stories and other news of the day.
Thus, the divide remains clear between establishment type people and ordinary people!!
Oh, I can go on…