In a new paper in the European Journal of Political Research, Daniel Devine, Viktor Valgardsson, Will Jennings, Gerry Stoker, and Hannah Bunting examine which qualities of governments influence their perceived trustworthiness. They look at the distinct roles of “competence,” “benevolence,” and “integrity.”
The authors “empirically test the effects of these three dimensions of trustworthiness through conjoint experiments conducted in five countries: Britain, Croatia, Spain, Argentina, and France.” Competence, they write, is about whether the government has ability. Benevolence is about perceptions of the governments’ motivations — do the people believe that the government is acting in their interest? Finally, there is integrity, which “refers to whether the trusted is open, honest and likely to be consistent in their behavior and is often associated with subscribing to laudable moral convictions.”
They measured the relative importance of these three qualities through “two different forced-choice, non-registered conjoint experiments, encompassing five countries from two continents.” In the first, they “fielded an extensive conjoint in the British Election Study (BES) in May 2020 which we matched with the extensive respondent-level data (e.g., education and income) in the same wave of the BES.” They then fielded an updated version in Croatia, Spain, Argentina, and France.
They found that benevolence was the most significant determinant. Still, they found “statistically significant heterogeneity between countries, with benevolence having a substantially larger effect in Spain and Croatia than in France and Argentina.”
But they also look at how the attributes are conditional on one another and how effects are moderate by the characteristics of respondents (that is, it’s not only up to the governments, but the traits of those they’re serving).
Left-Right Divide
Ultimately, they found that “the effects of attributes are generally consistent, although respondent left-right ideology moderates the impact of government competence.”
The authors acknowledge key limitations of their study. For example, “it is difficult to precisely pinpoint the meaning and multi-faceted content of each of these dimensions in a survey experiment.” Also, their survey respondents were answering questions about a hypothetical government, meaning that there will likely be differences when these respondents are engaging not with a survey, but with reality: “In the real world, individuals will not perceive these government qualities (entirely) objectively.”
The authors suggest that future research should aim to further and better understand the dynamics they describe and explore in their paper. Additionally, future research “should also examine how people develop differing perceptions of these different dimensions of trustworthiness: for example, does economic performance primarily operate through perceptions of competence? Is the link between trust and vote intention primarily due to benevolence perceptions, and how does this vary across contexts and individuals?”
If future research does that, the authors and researchers more generally have reason to trust that their understanding of these issues will improve.
