Project

Overview

CONTRUST investigates one of the most repeated but least settled claims in democratic politics: that political trust helps governments address difficult policy problems. Political leaders, public bodies, and researchers often assume that trust matters for policy support, but the theoretical and empirical basis for that claim remains uneven.

The project develops a systematic account of when trust matters, who or what is being trusted, and which policy tasks make trust consequential. It focuses on three major governance challenges: climate and the environment, redistribution and inequality, and crime prevention.

Over 5 years, the project will provide new panel data, experiments, merging of existing panel data, and a multi-team meta study. It also aims to build reusable data resources and collaborative research designs that help the wider field test the consequences of political trust more transparently.

Research Questions

The project will answer a range of questions.

• How, when, and why does political trust shape public support for major policy action?
• When does trust matter more: when policies involve uncertainty, sacrifice, risk, or particular political actors and institutions?
• Do existing survey measures of political trust capture the policy-specific judgements citizens actually make?
• How stable are trust attitudes over time, and how do changes in trust relate to changes in policy support?
• How much do research design choices affect findings about the consequences of political trust?

Funding

CONTRUST is funded by the European Research Council and hosted at the University of Southampton.