academic publications

2024

1. PA

   Learning to Govern: A typology of Ministerial learning styles

   John Boswell, Jessica Smith, Daniel Devine, and 1 more author

   Public Administration 2024

   Abs

2. POBE

   Does Political Trust Matter? A Meta-analysis on the Consequences of Trust

   Daniel Devine

   Political Behaviour 2024

   Abs

   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 re- view and meta-analysis of 61 studies reporting 329 coefficients derived from over three and a half million observations globally. After synthesising the 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 considerations such as measurement of trust, modelling strategy, region of study, publication bias, and design of the study. By systemat- ically analysing the extant research, the paper provides a robust, systematic and empirical foundation to advance research on political trust.

2023

1. JPP

   Political Trust and Climate Policy Choice: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

   Daniel Devine, Gerry Stoker, and Will Jennings

   Journal of Public Policy 2023

   Abs

   Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behaviour 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 uncer- tainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint exper- iment 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 policy making.

2. JELST

   Support for digitising the ballot box: a systematic review of i-voting pilots and a conjoint experiment

   Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, and Daniel Devine

   Electoral studies 2023

   Abs

   Governments across the globe have been actively engaged in pilots aimed at implementing i-voting, which facilitates voting via the internet. I-voting innovations, such as those widely institutionalised in Estonia, Canada, and Switzerland, represent a modernising policy innovation that can increase the convenience of electoral participation and can also safeguard against the temporal suspensions of elections, such as those witnessed in a number of states during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst the wider implementation of i-voting has made some process, it has received mixed public support, mostly due to fears over its integrity. In this paper, we ask: what features of \textiti-voting attract public support and inspire trustworthiness in its implementation? We answer this using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in the UK, where we derive attributes from a comprehensive systematic review of existing literature and case studies of real-world implementation. Consistent with a rational-choice model of voting, reforms that are more convenient and have substantive reported benefits, specifically reforms that promise increases in participation, enjoy higher support. Electoral integrity remains an important factor in citizens support for, and trust in, i-voting: across the board, i-voting is perceived as less trustworthy than in-person voting, and proposals that may positively influence the risk of fraud are strongly rejected. Against pre-registered hypotheses, we do not find significant subgroup heterogeneity, for instance regarding satisfaction with internet coverage or the current electoral process, nor do we find significant variation based on past levels of engagement with alternative (convenience) options to in-person voting or indeed partisanship.

3. JEPP

   Political trust in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: a meta-analysis of 67 studies

   Daniel Devine, Viktor Valgarðsson, Jessica Smith, and 4 more authors

   Journal of European Public Policy 2023

   Abs

   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 government; but compliance is more strongly related to 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.

4. CUP

   Trust in Crisis?

   Will Jennings, Daniel Devine, Gerry Stoker, and 1 more author

   Under contract: Cambridge University Press 2023
5. EJPR

   Stability and Change in Political Trust: Evidence and implications from six panel studies

   Daniel Devine, and Viktor Valgarðsson

   European Journal of Political Research 2023

   Abs

   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.

6. PI

   Is Support for Liberal Democracy in Crisis?

   Daniel Devine

   Political Insight 2023

2022

1. EE

   Public Opinion

   Daniel Devine, and Viktor Valgarðsson

   Encyclopedia of Political Sociology 2022

2021

1. JEPP

   How trust, mistrust and distrust shape the governance of the COVID-19 crisis

   Will Jennings, Gerry Stoker, Viktor Valgarðsson, and 2 more authors

   Journal of European Public Policy 2021

   Abs

   It is commonplace to claim that trust is essential to effective governance in many contexts, including that of a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that trust is better understood as a family of concepts – trust, mistrust and distrust – and each of these may have different implications for the governance of COVID-19. Drawing on original measures tested through nationally representative surveys conducted in Australia, Italy, the UK and the USA between May and June 2020, we explore how these distinct types of trust are associated with citizens’ perceptions of the threat posed by COVID-19, and their behavioural responses to it. We show how public policy dynamics around the COVID-19 crisis are driven by each of the trust family members and that policymakers might gain more from promoting an information-seeking and mistrusting society, rather than a trusting one.

2. JEPOP

   Care to Trust? Gender and trust in leaders during the Coronavirus pandemic

   Hannah Bunting, Jessica Smith, and Daniel Devine

   Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 2021

   Abs

   There has been praise of how female leaders have handled the Coronavirus pandemic relative to their male counterparts by presenting a more “caring” leadership. Of similar coverage has been the role of public trust for how successful governments have been in containing outbreaks. In this paper, we build on these two literatures to understand different determinants of trust during the pandemic between men and women. Following social role theory, we argue that female citizens’ trust judgements are more likely to be driven by the perception that leaders are more caring than are men, whilst men’s judgements are more likely to be driven by competence judgements than women’s. We test this argument using original survey data from three countries. We find that this relationship holds in the United States, but not the United Kingdom or Italy. This adds to variation in gender gaps in the USA and Europe; at the same time, it also suggests that the propensity for women to be less trusting than men is not down to (perceived) leadership traits.

3. PRQ

   What satisfaction with democracy? A global analysis of “satisfaction with democracy” measures

   Viktor Orri Valgarðsson, and Daniel Devine

   Political Research Quarterly 2021

   Abs

   Asking citizens “the way democracy works” is the basis of a wide literature on the support citizens have for their political institutions and is one of the most common survey items in political science. Moreover, it is a key indicator for the purported global decline in legitimacy. Yet, its trends, levels, and dynamics are still debated, and conclusions may be erroneous. In this paper, we compile a unique global dataset between 1973 and 2018 encompassing all major cross-national datasets and national election studies in twelve countries to study the dynamics and consistency of “satisfaction with democracy” (SWD) measures globally. Our results show that while trends and between-country differences in democratic satisfaction are largely similar, the levels of satisfaction vary substantially between survey projects, and both trends and levels vary significantly in several widely studied countries. We show that this has consequences at the individual level: opting for one survey over another may alter our conclusions about the relationship between key demographics and SWD. Thus, researchers studying SWD should endeavor to consult diverse survey sources and should be cautious about their conclusions when they do not, especially when it comes to making claims about changes in SWD over time.

4. JEPP

   Can EU Judicial Intervention Increase Polity Scepticism? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Spain

   Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, and Daniel Devine

   Journal of European Public Policy 2021

   Abs

   The mantra of ‘take back control’ has become a staple of eurosceptics across the European Union. At the centre of the slogan’s message is a call to arms against the (perceived) challenge that EU membership represents for national sovereignty. In this paper, we theorize that supranational decisions taken by the European Court of Justice can increase ‘polity scepticism’ – increased opposition to the EU and decreased satisfaction with national democracy – by cueing citizens regarding the effects of EU integration on the perception of diluted sovereignty. Empirically, we leverage quasi-experimental evidence to support our theory, establishing that ECJ rulings have a significant causal effect on euroscepticism and dissatisfaction with democracy. The implications of our findings suggest that EU institutions seeking to ensure compliance with the rule of law and EU norms should proceed with caution. Interventionist action may backfire by increasing scrutiny of the EU’s legitimacy and undermining polity support.

5. SSQ

   Discrete Events and Hate Crimes: The Causal Role of the Brexit Referendum

   Daniel Devine

   Social Science Quarterly 2021

   Abs

   Objective: The article contributes to the literature on discrete events and behavioral change among the public by studying the link between the United Kingdom’s 2016 “Brexit”referendum and racial and religious hate crime. Methods: Time series intervention models on daily and monthly hate crime numbers from the UK Home Office and police forces, controlling for other events such as terror attacks. A range of robustness tests including additional vector auto-regression. Results: The Brexit referendum led to a 19–23 percent increase in hate crimes, but did not lead to a longer-term increase. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications, and there is no evidence of a relationship between media coverage of hate crime or immigration salience and hate crimes. The results also show the consistent, large effect of terror attacks on increasing the number of hate crimes. Conclusion: The Brexit referendum caused an increase in hate crimes on par with terror attacks. Discrete political events, like referendums and elections, can play a sizeable role in prejudicial behavioral change.

6. WEP

   Do perceived economic constraints affect performance voting?

   Cal Le Gall, and Daniel Devine

   West European Politics 2021

   Abs

   One of the purported effects of international integration is that voters are less able, or less willing, to punish or reward incumbents for economic performance: since governments are less able to influence economic outcomes, this consideration weighs less for voters at the ballot box. This would have serious implications for democratic legitimacy. Yet the balancing demands hypothesis predicts voters compensate for this by judging incumbents on non-economic performance instead. In this paper, we critique this theory theoretically and empirically, putting it to the test for one of the first times at the individual level. Combining perceptions of policy performance across six issue areas with novel survey items which measure perceptions of economic policy, we show that whilst performance voting does occur, there is no support for the balancing demands hypothesis. Voting based on performance in economic or non-economic areas remains largely unrelated to perceptions of constraint.

7. EUP

   From Convergence to Congruence: European Integration and Citizen-Elite Congruence

   Daniel Devine, and Raimondas Ibenskas

   European Union Politics 2021

   Abs

   Recent research argues that European integration has led to an ideological convergence of member state party systems, which is purported to have significant consequences for democratic representation. We argue that convergence of party positions is less problematic if congruence between governed and governing is maintained. We therefore turn to test whether integration has had an effect on congruence between the public and their governing elites. Using five measures of integration, two sources of public opinion data, and expert surveys on political parties, we find little evidence that integration into the European Union reduces congruence between the public and the national party system, government or legislature either ideologically or across five issue areas. These results should assuage concerns about integration’s effect on domestic political representation.

8. PSR

   Trust and the Coronavirus Pandemic: What are the Consequences of and for Trust? An Early Review of the Literature

   Daniel Devine, Jennifer Gaskell, Will Jennings, and 1 more author

   Political Studies Review 2021

   Abs

   Trust between governors and the governed is seen as essential to facilitating good governance. This claim has become a prominent contention during the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis also presents a unique test of key hypotheses in the trust literature. Moreover, understanding the dynamics of trust, how it facilitates and hinders policy responses, and also the likely effects of these responses on trust are going to be fundamental questions in policy and trust research in the future. In this article, we review the early literature on the coronavirus pandemic and political and social trust, summarise their findings and highlight key challenges for future research. We show how the studies shed light on trust’s association with implementation of government measures, public compliance with them, mortality rates and the effect of government action on levels of trust. We also urge caution given the varying ways of measuring trust and operationalising the impact of the pandemic, the existence of common issues with quantitative studies and the relatively limited geographical scope of studies to date. We argue that it is going to be important to have a holistic understanding of these dynamics, using mixed-methods research as well as the quantitative studies we review here.

9. WEP

   Perceived government autonomy, economic evaluations, and political support during the Eurozone crisis

   Daniel Devine

   West European Politics 2021

   Abs

   The Eurozone crisis and resulting economic interventions present a particular manifestation of the dilemma between globalisation and national democracy, one in which supranational involvement led to an unprecedented reduction in democratic governance. This has been linked to an erosion in support for the domestic political system, but the precise mechanism is still debated. This article tests two mechanisms proposed in the recent literature: firstly, that citizens perceived that their domestic system’s autonomy was constrained by the economic interventions, which led citizens to reduce their support for the domestic system; secondly, that the decline was due to worsening economic evaluations. This article tests these arguments together at the individual level for the first time using a multilevel analysis of European Election Study data, and replicates the results with a case study of Portugal. The analysis finds no support for the autonomy argument, but instead points to the crucial role of economic evaluations.

10. PSRM

    Economic Interventions, Economic Perceptions and Political Support During the Eurozone Crisis

    Daniel Devine, and Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte

    Political Science Research and Methods 2021

    Abs

    What is the effect of external economic intervention on political support and economic evaluations? We argue that economic interventions systematically worsen support for governing institutions and much of this is mediated through updating economic perceptions, at least during the Eurozone crisis. We evidence this with two analyses. First, we provide the first quasi-experimental evidence to show that intervention worsened both political support and economic evaluations. Second, we conduct a mediation analysis using Eurobarometer data to quantify how much of the effect of intervention is mediated by economic evaluations. This has broader implications for understanding how citizens react to international integration, international cues, and the process of forming judgements of political support.

2020

1. BJPS

   Does Media Coverage Drive Public Support for UKIP or Does Public Support for UKIP Drive Media Coverage?

   Justin Murphy, and Daniel Devine

   British Journal of Political Science 2020

   Abs

   Previous research suggests media attention may increase support for populist right-wing parties, but extant evidence is mostly limited to proportional representation systems in which such an effect would be most likely. At the same time, in the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, an ongoing political and regulatory debate revolves around whether the media give disproportionate coverage to the populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). This study uses a mixed-methods research design to investigate the causal dynamics of UKIP support and media coverage as an especially valuable case. Vector autoregression, using monthly, aggregate time-series data from January 2004 to April 2017, provides new evidence consistent with a model in which media coverage drives party support, but not vice versa. The article identifies key periods in which stagnating or declining support for UKIP is followed by increases in media coverage and subsequent increases in public support. The findings show that media coverage may drive public support for right-wing populist parties in a substantively non-trivial fashion that is irreducible to previous levels of public support, even in a national institutional environment least supportive of such an effect. The findings have implications for political debates in the UK and potentially other liberal democracies.

2019