How Do Citizens Make Judgements on Political Trustworthiness? A New Model for Decision-Making in a Low-Trust Political Environment

Introduction

Falling trust and rising political disillusionment are common trends across the United Kingdom and many other Western countries (Citrin and Stoker, 2018; Clarke et al., 2018). While confidence in implementing institutions (such as the police and legal system) has tended to increase in recent decades, trust in representative institutions (such as parliaments, governments and parties) has declined significantly, pointing to ‘a crisis of trust in elected representatives’ (Valgarðsson et al., 2024: 20). In the United Kingdom, only 14% of people regard politicians as trustworthy (Electoral Commission, 2025) and longitudinal data suggests that antipolitical sentiment has risen steadily over the past three decades (Clarke et al., 2018).

Trust is important for political elites: without it, politics may be viewed negatively, making it more difficult for politicians to operate (Flinders, 2012; Whiteley et al., 2016). Political trust has a significant positive relationship with a range of outcomes including policy compliance and voter turnout (Devine, 2024), while low trust is related to support for challenger parties and may feed the growth of populism (Berman, 2019; Bertsou, 2019). Governments that cannot count on the trust of citizens may be constrained in tackling long-term issues (Flinders, 2012; Stoker and Evans, 2019). In the face of threats such as climate change, international conflict and pandemics, trust matters.

While there has been much quantitative research into the factors that relate to variations in trust levels (see Citrin and Stoker, 2018), there has been little qualitative research about how individuals make decisions about the trustworthiness (or not) of their representatives – and what politicians might do to improve the situation. An exception is the work of Winsvold et al. (2024), who use open-ended survey questions to explore the bases of trust and distrust. The present study goes further, using a novel focus group exercise to examine citizens’ thought processes in greater depth. And in contrast to the relatively high-trust Norwegian sample used by Winsvold and colleagues, I speak to residents of one of the United Kingdom’s ‘left behind’ areas, providing an insight into judgements in a low-trust environment.

The article proceeds as follows: First, I situate the study in the existing literature on political trust and trustworthiness. Next, I outline the methods used to explore citizens’ decision-making and the advantages of using focus groups for this purpose. I then provide a detailed analysis of the focus group data, observing that almost all participants share a deep cynicism about politicians but take a number of different approaches to identifying those who are the ‘least bad’. Based on this analysis I propose a novel model for decision-making on political trust. Finally, I show how these findings contribute to previous research and conclude by considering the implications for politicians looking to rebuild trust.

Background

Within the psychology literature, trust is conceptualised as a relationship with two key elements: acceptance of risk (vulnerability) on the part of the trustor, and positive expectation of the behaviour of the trustee (Evans and Krueger, 2009; Mayer et al., 1995). Applying this to a political context, the citizen makes herself vulnerable by handing power to a politician or party to represent her – based on the expectation that the representative has the skills and motivation to act in line with her interests and values (Rose and Wessels, 2019). But on what is this expectation founded?

For those with strong party affiliation, partisanship may be a key factor (Warren, 2018). However, with declining party membership, more voters are following individual politicians rather than parties as a whole. Cwalina and Falkowski (2016: 221) suggest that personal traits of the ‘candidate’s image’ (which may or may not be true reflection of the candidate themselves) are therefore becoming increasingly important in forming judgements. For non-partisans, the behaviour of individual politicians – particularly leaders – may also provide a heuristic for judging the trustworthiness of government in general (Starke et al., 2020; Valgarðsson et al., 2020; Whiteley et al., 2016).

The idea that trust judgements are based on an evaluation of well-known, individual politicians and their behaviour, was therefore the starting point for this research. There seems to be a general consensus in the literature that such judgements consist of at least two attributes: integrity/honesty and competence/ability (Hay, 2007; Levi and Stoker, 2000; Whiteley et al., 2016). Other scholars propose either benevolence (Devine et al., 2024; Mayer et al., 1995) or authenticity – being ‘normal’ and ‘in touch’ with ordinary people – as third dimensions (Clarke et al., 2018; Valgarðsson et al., 2020, 2024). Recent literature also highlights that a lack of trust may take positive or negative forms: while mistrust, or political scepticism, may promote political accountability (Devine et al., 2020; Norris, 2017), active distrust, which is closer to cynicism, may pose a danger to democratic politics (Bertsou, 2019).

Devine et al. (2024) examine the causes of government trustworthiness through a conjoint experiment and find that benevolence (defined as ‘acting in citizens interests’, rather than for themselves) is the most important factor, above competence and integrity. However, the limitation of the findings is that the study relies on a narrow definition of the concepts, for example, integrity is operationalised as transparency, which may differ from how citizens understand the term. Furthermore, the experiment uses hypothetical governments, meaning factors such as partisan identity and emotion – which are likely to play a role in trust judgements (Erhardt et al., 2021; Warren, 2018) – cannot be accounted for.

Likewise, Valgarðsson et al. (2024) use a conjoint experiment to test the importance of the attributes of competence, integrity and authenticity across seven democracies. Traits associated with authenticity seem to matter more to people with low political trust, while those associated with competence seem to be important to those who are more trusting.

While these studies offer the benefit of scale, the disadvantage of survey or experimental methods is that citizens have to choose from a limited range of options which are predefined by the researcher. Winsvold et al. (2024) tackle this issue by using open-ended survey questions to ask about the bases of trustworthiness among citizens in Norway. However, they still use a deductive approach to coding the responses, rather than allowing patterns to emerge inductively. Focusing on local politicians, who are often regarded more favourably than those at the national level (Allen and Birch, 2015), Winsvold et al. find that predictability is the most important basis for trustworthiness. Intrinsic commitment, which includes perceived intentions, morals and collegiality, is most often mentioned in relation to distrust. However, Windsvold and colleagues acknowledge that most respondents gave short ‘off the cuff’ responses and suggest that to gain a more ‘nuanced’ understanding, alternative methods would be required (2024: 11).

The current study therefore extends this existing research in three respects. First, in a largely quantitative field, the study takes a novel approach by using focus groups to gain a deeper insight into the decision-making process. Second, rather than focusing on local or hypothetical politicians, it probes citizens’ views on the most high-profile political figures of the day. Finally, in contrast to the relatively high-trust Norwegian context of the study by Winsvold et al. (2024), the research is conducted in the lower trust setting of one of the United Kingdom’s ‘left-behind’ places. Such locations are associated with political discontent and have been the focus of increased policy interest in recent years (MacKinnon et al., 2024).

Political alienation seems to be more pronounced in peripheral regions experiencing low productivity, long-term economic and industrial decline and with fewer ties to the centre (Dijkstra et al., 2020; McKay et al., 2024; Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). Green et al. (2025) find evidence that direct experience of objective economic decline has the potential to cause political distrust but note that perceptions of local decline are heterogeneous and may be conditioned by partisanship and personal circumstances. However, Rodríguez-Pose (2018) argues that territorial inequality is more important that personal inequality in generating political grievances and that the revolt against the elite is driven by ‘the places that don’t matter’ rather than ‘the people who don’t matter’. This article will contribute to this growing literature on geographic discontent by speaking to the residents of once such place.

Research design

Materials and procedure

Each session lasted 1.5 hours and followed the same discussion guide (see Supplemental Appendix II) with ground rules adapted from Krueger (2014). Participants were given some freedom to shape the conversation, provided it stayed within the subject area. All sessions were facilitated by the author, supported by an assistant. The discussion was audio recorded.

After an initial icebreaker question, all groups started with a practical exercise which occupied about half the session. A set of 10 printed cards were handed to each participant, showing the photos, names and positions of the best-known British politicians (Table 1), based on YouGov ratings for the first-quarter of 2023. These politicians were chosen to give the greatest chance that participants would recognise them and be able to form a judgement. The cards displayed official portrait photos from the UK Parliament website where available, or a photo in a similar style. For more background information about the politicians see Supplemental Appendix III.

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Table 1.

Politicians included in Exercise 1.

Name	Description provided to participants	Party (not provided)
Tony Blair	Former Prime Minister	Labour
David Cameron	Former Prime Minister	Conservative
Jeremy Corbyn	Independent MP for Islington North and former Leader of the Opposition	Independent (formerly Labour)
Nigel Farage	Former MEP and former leader of the UK Independence Party	Reform UK. At the time Farage was honorary president of the party. He became leader in June 2024
Matt Hancock	MP and former Health & Social Care Secretary	Conservative
Boris Johnson	Former Prime Minister	Conservative
Theresa May	Former Prime Minister	Conservative
Keir Starmer	MP and Leader of the Opposition	Labour
Rishi Sunak	Prime Minister	Conservative
Liz Truss	MP and former Prime Minister	Conservative

Participants were asked to work individually to place the cards in order from most to least trusted (putting any they did not recognise to one side) and then invited to discuss their choices as a group – making it possible to observe whether this changed their initial response. Following Clarke et al. (2018: 186) the aim was not to uncover information about particular politicians, but rather to expose the ‘marking criteria’ by which they were judged. All the politicians seemed to be recognised by all participants.

After the sessions, the recordings were transcribed and pseudonymised. The transcripts were coded in NVIVO. Coding was first carried out inductively to look for new themes, and then deductively against the attributes of integrity, competence and authenticity.

Findings

Stage 2: Decision-making strategies

When trying to decide which politicians were most or least trustworthy, not all participants followed the same process. Across the four groups, at least three main approaches could be observed, each of them across several groups. It is recognised that a larger sample may have produced even more types of strategies.

For some participants, the only trustworthy politicians were those who were different from ‘typical’ politicians (who were seen to be inherently dishonest). This may be related to the growing professionalisation of politics which means that representatives are drawn from an increasingly narrow group, appear to be detached from the ‘real world’ and seem incentivised to further their own interests (Allen and Cairney, 2017; Stiers et al., 2021). Other participants, particularly those of higher socioeconomic status, focused instead on which politicians were the most competent to run the country, and particularly the economy. Finally, a third group of participants, many (but not all) of whom were less interested in politics, consulted their emotions as a guide to trustworthiness and drew on feelings and personal experiences in making a judgement. For many participants – across all three decision-making routes – it seemed that some of the evidence used to support their choice was generated retrospectively.

Based on the observation of these discussions, a new model for decision-making in a low-trust political environment is proposed (Figure 1). The remainder of this article describes the elements within Stages 2 and 3 of the model in more detail, supported by evidence from the four focus group sessions.

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Figure 1.

Proposed framework for decision-making on political trustworthiness.

Difference from ‘Typical’ politicians

For half the participants in Group 2, there was one politician who stood out. In contrast to most participants who had struggled to find positive examples, four people unhesitatingly named one politician as the most trustworthy:

Facilitator:

So does anyone want to share who they’ve got at the top as the most trusted?

Karen:

Nigel Farage. ²

Ryan:

Nigel Farage.

Lewis:

Nigel Farage.

Mike:

Nigel Farage.

These participants were not copying each other – they were not all seated next to one another and had each made this judgement independently when putting the cards in order before the group discussion started.

For these participants, Farage was clearly different from other politicians because of his honest and straightforward communication style: ‘He calls a spade a spade’. He represented an alternative to the untrustworthy ‘establishment’ and, unlike other politicians who were responsible to their parties, he was free to ‘say it as it is’:

I think he’s outside the establishment, isn’t he? He’s sort of an independent and the others are all tarnished by political leanings to their respective parties. (Mike, Group 2)

It may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but there’s so much distrust of the main parties now that it’s nice to hear somebody else come around with maybe some alternative viewpoint. And I don’t think that there’s enough of that, really, from the other two mainstream parties. (Emma, Group 4)

Here Emma acknowledges that Farage is a divisive figure but this is interpreted as a positive signal because his ‘alternative’ views set him apart from other politicians. Farage’s anti-immigration stance chimed with local hostility towards a barge being used to house hundreds of young male immigrants in the nearby harbour.

Distrust of the establishment was also reflected in repeated mentions of conspiracy theories by some group members. More than one participant claimed that the World Health Organization was conspiring to reduce the population while several others suggested that climate change was a hoax. These participants believed the public were being kept in the dark about what was really happening while politicians were ‘playing the political game’ and failing to ‘commit to anything’. Farage, in contrast, was characterised as straight talking and consistent:

He means what he says. And he doesn’t beat around the bush when he says it. (Karen, Group 2)

While to some extent this could reflect partisanship – many of the participants who picked out Farage had voted Leave and/or were Reform UK voters – people in other groups made similar arguments about ‘difference’ from other politicians as a sign of trustworthiness. Other examples included Rory Stewart, Jeremy Corbyn, Liz Truss (‘she went against the world’s authorities’) and Tony Blair:

All of the people I’ve put on the left [i.e. ranked as least trustworthy], I think, are self serving, greedy [. . .] not there for the good of the country, but the good of themselves. And I think the only person that stands out above the crowd is Jeremy Corbyn, because he’s the only one with integrity. (Henry, Group 3)

Tony Blair, I mean, when he came in it was an exciting change of government and, you know, everyone was excited and he wore jeans and he went to football matches . . . it was that change that brought about some trust. (Heather, Group 4)

This is not to suggest that Farage, Corbyn and others are similar in terms of style or policy, rather that they appear more trustworthy to some voters – particularly, though not exclusively, those of lower socioeconomic status – by stepping outside the mould of the ‘typical’ (i.e. dishonest) politician.

Focus on competence

As illustrated in the model above, a second common decision-making strategy was to focus on competence to ‘run the country’ as an indication of trustworthiness (still from the starting point that most politicians are untrustworthy). This argument was most often used by participants in professional/managerial occupations.

Competence was most often recognised in terms of personal qualities such as skills, knowledge and professional experience. Some said they judged politicians as trustworthy if they seemed to work hard and stick at the job: Theresa May was ranked highly by several people for this reason. Perspicacity and sound decision-making were also seen as signs of competence:

It’s understanding. Having the intellect to understand some of the really complex nuances of what politics is. And being able then to make the right call. (Lisa, Group 1)

I’ll start . . . I actually trust Keir Starmer more than almost all of the others on the basis he’s actually done a proper job [referring to the fact he worked as a barrister before becoming a politician] . . . And got reasonable results. (Charles, Group 3)

Experience that was related to the politician’s portfolio was seen as particularly valuable and several participants said they couldn’t trust politicians to do the job if they didn’t know enough about the subject matter. Across three groups, participants mentioned frequent Cabinet reshuffles as contributing to this problem:

I don’t understand how someone who hasn’t worked in that sector understands it well enough . . . like education and stuff like that. I don’t understand how they can just jump around. (Laura, Group 1)

Policy successes and failures were less often discussed than personal traits – perhaps because the task focused mainly on individual politicians – but managing the economy was seen as critical by those who focused on competence. Several participants gave this as a reason for not trusting Jeremy Corbyn, as the following quote illustrates:

When it comes to trust, I just wouldn’t trust him with the economy. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t trust him running the country [. . . ] The country is like a business and you have to be able to, you know, make the books work, in some respects. (Dan, Group 1)

Some participants grappled with the question of what ‘trust’ meant in the context of politics and the emphasis on competence seemed to be a conscious strategy in some cases:

There’s trusting him as a person and then there’s trusting him . . . as a statesman. (Matt, Group 1)

I think not just integrity, it’s competence in running a government [. . .] Do you trust them in their belief in what they do? Or do you trust them to run the country? (Adam, Group 3)

These participants also tended to take a wider, international perspective on politics (compared with those who singled out Farage), for example, considering the United Kingdom’s position in the world and contrasting British politicians with those in other countries:

I just don’t think he [Boris Johnson] was very good for the country really. I just don’t think he represented us very well. (Becky, Group 2)

I’ve lived overseas and experienced other governments, and I would say even the current shower are relatively trustworthy. (Adam, Group 3)

Consulting emotions

The third common decision-making strategy was to draw on emotion. The role of emotion has been discussed relatively little in the literature on political trust and decision-making (Erhardt et al., 2021; Neuman et al., 2018), but it seemed that for some participants it was events they had experienced – and associated emotions – that informed their judgements about trustworthiness. This was particularly (but not only) the case for participants who were less interested in politics. Unlike information received passively, which may be hard to recall, memories of events are vivid and easy to access, especially if they have emotional content (Theiss-Morse and Barton, 2017).

For example, two participants spoke of close family members who had died during the Covid pandemic and whose funerals they were unable to attend due to lockdown measures. In this context, the Partygate revelations generated strong feelings of betrayal and anger towards political leaders such as Johnson and Hancock who had flaunted regulations while others suffered:

And having actually been involved with somebody that nearly died during COVID, and seeing the impact on the family of [. . .] believing that they were never going to see that person again just was a step too far for me to be able to have trust in those people that were involved in that. (Linda, Group 4)

However, not all experiences had a negative effect. Previous literature has focused on the way fear and anger might increase or decrease trust (Erhardt et al., 2021), but positive emotions also seemed to play a role. In most cases, direct contact with MPs had had led to positive feelings and increased trust:

Andy Burnham. I met him on a train, had a chat to him. He’s fantastic. Loads of great work with homelessness in Manchester. And I really like [him and Angela Rayner] and I trust them because of who they are, the connection, and feeling akin, I guess, and representing my beliefs as well. (Heather, Group 4)

Well, he’s a genuine man [Jeremy Corbyn]. I’ve met him a few times. I’ve been, I’ve heard his speeches. He’s a man of the people . . . And you can actually, I’ve actually gone out and shook his hand. I’ve got a picture of my daughter going up and, you know, Ooh, can I have a selfie? (Brian, Group 1)

The sense of closeness and warmth in both these anecdotes relates to the concept of authenticity – politicians being more ‘in touch’ and ‘real’ – one of the key trust attributes identified in the literature:

I felt he could relate more to my life. Like, it’s as simple as the fact that he rode a bicycle and he had an allotment and all those like, you know, little things compared to people who went to Eton. So, I just feel he was more connected to [. . .] my life, my lifestyle. (Emily, Group 1)

Positive emotion generated by humour also contributed to a sense of trustworthiness, particularly in the case of Boris Johnson:

I was thinking, why have I put Boris in the middle? And I think it’s because of Have I Got News For You. Because he has hosted it, and I love that programme. And I have this baseline that if someone’s willing to laugh at themselves, I trust them more, rightly or wrongly . . . Because I’d seen him on that and seen how he conversed on that. I felt like I knew him, or I felt like I trusted him, whether I agreed with him or not. (Zoe, Group 3)

Johnson’s appearances on comedy panel shows might have created a sense of ‘parasocial interaction’ (Becker, 2020: 279) with viewers, that led them to develop an emotional connection or even start to feel they knew him as a friend. Combined with his knack for spotting photo opportunities that created a ‘lovable buffoon’ persona, this may have helped him to appear more relatable – and trustworthy – despite his privileged background:

One of the things that makes me lean more towards him [Boris Johnson] than some of the others is that he is a bit more normal . . . he feels more like the kind of people that, you would see, walking down the street, have a chat to in the pub, that sort of thing. (Karen, Group 2)

Of course, this effect was not consistent across all participants – many others were distrusting of Johnson – but humour may have particularly influenced those like Zoe, who said they actively avoided the news and relied on other media for political information. A quarter of all participants said they had made a conscious decision not to watch the news at all – either for reasons of mental health or because they didn’t trust the content.

Discussion

In setting out to understand ‘how do citizens make decisions on political trustworthiness’, perhaps I was slightly misguided. Underlying this initial question is an assumption that there is a decision to be made at all. These focus group discussions suggest that for many people that is not the case: politicians are, by definition, untrustworthy. By choosing to become politicians, MPs mark themselves out as untrustworthy types. This is consistent with recent opinion polling in which MPs are rated the least trustworthy of all professions, with a net score of −64. Only journalists receive an almost similarly damning rating (−51), compared with family doctors at +68 and teachers at +54 (YouGov, 2024).

Fresh evidence of MPs’ inherent untrustworthiness is provided by the media every day, in what one participant described as a ‘constant feeding in of little wrongdoings’ from online news sources. It is therefore more a question of which ones are least untrustworthy, and participants found a number of ways to approach this. Clearly, if politicians are by their nature dishonest, then one strategy is to identify those who are least like ‘typical’ politicians. This led many participants towards Nigel Farage, who (at the time) also had the advantage that he had never been elected as an MP, and therefore had the freedom to ‘say it as it is’ without the real-life constraints that mean politicians must negotiate, compromise and sometimes change course.

This widespread disillusionment with the political class, coupled with economic discontent in ‘left behind places’, could help to explain the growing rise of populist leaders across many parts of the world. The findings are in keeping with the recent work of Valgarðsson et al. (2024), who found that the extent to which politicians ‘come across as different from other politicians’ and ‘mean what he/she says, even if people don’t want to hear it’ (almost the exact words that were used about Farage) were particularly important to less-trusting citizens.

A second strategy for judging trustworthiness, favoured more often by participants of higher socioeconomic status, was to focus on competence. Again, this is consistent with Valgarðsson et al. (2024) who found that ‘competence matters more to respondents with higher trust, higher income and university education’. Based on the discussions I observed, this may also be related to the way that citizens view the role of MPs – whether they focus on the way they operate at a national level, or whether they take into account the role of politicians in representing Britain on the world stage.

While Valgarðsson et al. (2024) found that politicians who had ‘a reputation for handling their duties poorly’ were the least trusted overall, they also noted that being ‘in touch with everyday life and ordinary people’ (authenticity) was almost as important. This relates more to the third decision-making group: those who called on their personal experience and emotions when judging trustworthiness. There seemed to be several ways in which a sense of ‘closeness’ with politicians came about – whether through face-to-face meeting, shared hobbies or ‘parasocial interaction’ through informal television appearances – but all of these contributed to a favourable judgement of trustworthiness. In several cases, this was enough to override more traditional reasons for distrust such as dishonesty or incompetence.

Based on my observations, I would suggest that the initial decision-making process is not necessarily rational and that some of the reasoning is generated after a fast judgement has been made. In an era of 24/7 media coverage and with social media algorithms providing a wide array of potential headlines and soundbites to choose from, citizens have ample scope to pick and choose evidence that fits any interpretation. It may also be related to the fact that the overriding tone of reporting about politicians is negative, so evidence of dishonesty is easy to obtain (feeding into the judgement that ‘all politicians are untrustworthy’), but positive indicators are harder to access.

While it should be acknowledged that the findings are based on a relatively small sample of people, all living in the same geographic area, the decision-making strategies described were all observed across more than one group. A wider and more diverse sample might have generated even more evaluative approaches. However, a strength of the research is that it provides an insight into attitudes within one of the United Kingdom’s ‘forgotten towns’, places that have been culturally and economically left behind (Pearce and Chrisp, 2021). Such areas have become a focus for policymakers and politicians, seen in initiatives such as the Conservatives’ flagship ‘Levelling Up’ policy and more recently the Labour Party’s ‘Plan for Neighbourhoods’’. ³

Conclusion

In this article I offer a new insight into the evaluative processes of citizens living in a ‘left behind place’. I show that politicians are widely viewed as inherently untrustworthy and although this does not seem to be a direct result of local economic decline, geographic inequality may heighten the perception that the political class is ‘out of touch’ with ordinary people. I document four focus group discussions which not only reveal participants’ thought processes but also the role of group dynamics in political evaluations, an aspect which is missing from existing literature. Based on these findings, I offer a new model for decision-making on trust. The article builds on existing literature about the drivers of trust (e.g. Valgarðsson et al., 2024) contributing fresh insights about the construction of trustworthiness in a UK context and the positive role of emotion.

What are the implications of this for parties looking to rebuild trust with the electorate? There are some positives to take away. First, that several participants were able to trust politicians they did not choose to vote for nor fully agree with, suggesting that (to some extent at least) it is possible to build trust across party lines. Second, it was evident from all the sessions that people listened to each other and were able to update their preferences in the light of new evidence, providing some hope that rebuilding trust is not a completely impossible endeavour.

However, the key finding must be that politicians in general seem to be widely considered untrustworthy by default. Everything that MPs say or do once elected is interpreted through this lens. This would suggest that increasing political trust cannot be achieved by one party working alone – a more fundamental change to the way politics itself is conducted is needed to bridge the gap between ‘typical’ (i.e. untrustworthy) politicians and ‘normal’ people (e.g. teachers and doctors), who are trusted by most people. What happens to people when they become an MP that suddenly makes them so untrustworthy? Perhaps the combative, antiquated style of discourse in the House of Commons does not help. Participants liked politicians who would ‘admit they were wrong at times’ and could find ‘sections of agreement with the opposition’. Neither the current format of political discussion, nor the way it is reported by the media, leave much space for making compromises or acting like ‘normal people’. The jeering from across the chamber, use of the third person and other archaic language employed in parliamentary debates make politicians seem more like private schoolboys than members of the public. And any action they take is interpreted through the lens of distrust: Starmer’s attendance at a Taylor Swift concert in June was reported fairly positively during the election campaign (Sky News, 2024), but ramped up into a ‘freebies scandal’ after he took office. This suggests it is perhaps not so much the politicians who are the problem, but the environment and political system in which they operate.

Clearly, being seen to do a ‘good job’ of running the country is also an important factor in rebuilding trust, and in the current polycrisis this is not easy to achieve. Citizens have high expectations for what government can deliver, alongside relatively little appreciation for the complexity of the task (Flinders, 2012). Appointing ministers with relevant prior experience and avoiding frequent cabinet reshuffles could be one step in the right direction.

For other participants, positive emotion was a more important indicator of trustworthiness. Again, not easy to implement but creating more opportunities for people to meet politicians face to face might help with this – although it is recognised that security concerns make this increasingly difficult. Further research could consider whether online interaction can have a similarly positive effect – the idea of MPs hosting Facebook Live sessions was discussed later in the focus group and was met with general enthusiasm. MP appearances on non-news media may help, but only if they are genuinely at ease with the format. ‘Feel good’ national events such as the Olympics and other large sporting events may also have a positive effect.

If changing the image of politicians is not achieved, the results for our democracy could be serious. Across the world, there we have seen growing support for parties such as the AfD and politicians such as Orban and Trump. If mainstream politicians cannot find ways to successfully bridge the gap with ordinary people, then populist politicians are ready and waiting to fill it.

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