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Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s (lack of) trust in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1; N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2; N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the United States, a bipartisan group of political leaders. At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar and shared threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons suggesting that attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that even relatively early in the pandemic people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than they did outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises.
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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
Three Essays on Promoting Trust through Public Policies and its Consequences for Political Attitudes
Political trust is essential for effective policy implementation, yet declining levels of trust create a vicious cycle where diminished public confidence undermines policy responsiveness, leading to further erosion of trust. This dissertation explores how specific public policies can foster political trust and examines how trust itself influences the relationship between governance structures and political attitudes, particularly concerning support for climate policies. In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of self-targeting public policies, where citizens can choose to opt into benefits, on political trust. My empirical analysis reveals that self-targeting enhances confidence in local government compared to pre-targeting approaches, which do not yield significant results. The findings suggest that policy design, particularly the targeting mechanism, plays a critical role in shaping political attitudes. Chapter 3 argues that bottom-up policies that are participatory in nature, like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), can help mitigate the negative effect of inequalities on political trust. Using a quasi-experimental framework, I find strong evidence in support of this argument, reinforcing the importance of inclusive policy design in enhancing democratic processes. The final chapter shifts focus to governance structures, exploring how exposure to non-state climate actions influences climate policy support in less polarized contexts. My results indicate that while exposure does not directly affect policy support, citizens with higher political trust are less likely to hold governments accountable for climate inaction. This underscores the critical need to understand the nuanced role of political trust as a mediator for climate policy support.
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- PAR ID:
- 10561787
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proquest
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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