Publications

NEW BOOK

Trust: How Citizens View Political Institutions, Oxford University Press (2024)  30% off flyer
We seem to be living in an age of citizen distrust of social and political elites. Distrust is also seen to have numerous negative consequences for our civic and democratic life. Yet are western democracies really facing a crisis of trust? This book provides an extensive and up-to-date review of one of the most important topics in contemporary political life. It explores the nature and condition of trust today by exploring three key issues. What do we mean by trust? How far are levels of trust in decline? How damaging are the consequences of low trust for effective democratic governance? The book also considers how trust arises, and which factors might explain the declines in trust witnessed recently in many countries. Providing evidence from many countries, Trust: How Citizens View Political Institutions pays particular attention to Britain, which has seen a marked decline in public regard for political elites, making the country a vital case for identifying the causes and effects of low trust. Combining conceptual and empirical analysis, the book provides a timely analysis of a central issue in contemporary political debate.

Blogpost drawing on book's findings.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

‘Follow the Science’: Popular Trust in Scientific Experts During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Ben Seyd, Joseph A Hamm, Will Jennings, Lawrence McKay, Viktor Valgarðsson and Meredith Anness
Public Understanding of Science (link to paper)
The coronavirus pandemic increased the role played by scientific advisers in counselling governments and citizens on issues around public health. This raises questions about how citizens evaluate scientists, and in particular the grounds on which they trust them. Previous studies have identified various factors associated with trust in scientists, although few have systematically explored a range of judgements and their relative effects. This study takes advantage of scientific advisers’ heightened public profile during the pandemic to explore how people’s trust in scientists is shaped by perceptions about their features and traits, along with evaluations of their behaviour and role within the decision-making process. The study also considers people’s trust in politicians, thereby identifying whether trust in scientists reflects similar or distinctive considerations to trust in partisan actors. Data are derived from specially-designed conjoint experiments and surveys of nationally representative samples in Britain and the US.

Political Legitimacy in Western Europe: Comparing People's Expectations and Evaluations of Democracy
Ben Seyd
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties,  33:1, 2023 (link to journal; paper)
Democratic legitimacy is sometimes measured by comparing what individuals expect of democracy with their evaluations of democratic performance. However, such composite measures hinder our understanding of whether any factors found to shape legitimacy do so through effects on expectations, through effects on evaluations or through effects on both. This article considers people’s democratic expectations and evaluations separately. By modelling each – along with their combination in a measure of legitimacy – it identifies the factors that shape each outcome, and in particular whether any effects on legitimacy run through what people expect of democracy or through how they evaluate democratic performance. Models are run for four different dimensions of democracy to test whether the factors shaping people’s attitudes vary between different aspects of the democratic system. The analysis is conducted using Wave 6 of the European Social Survey (2012-13) on populations across 16 west European countries. Analysis of individual country populations also enables us to identify whether the causes and mechanisms of democratic legitimacy vary between different national contexts.
Results of the individual country regression models are here.

Perceived Risk Crowds out Trust? Trust and Public Compliance with Coronavirus Restrictions over the Course of the Pandemic
Ben Seyd and Feifei Bu
European Political Science Review, 14: 2, 2022 (link to article; blogpost)
Governments rely on citizen compliance for official rules to be effective. Yet achieving compliance is often tricky, particular when individual costs are high. Under what conditions will citizens voluntarily respect collective rules? We explore public compliance with SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) restrictions, focusing on the role of political trust. We anticipate that the effects of trust on compliance will be conditional on the presence of other factors, notably fear of infection. Low levels of fear may provide room for trust to shape compliance; yet high levels of fear may ‘crowd out’ the role of trust. We hypothesise that, at the pandemic’s outset, compliance was likely to be shaped more by fear than by trust. Yet as the pandemic progressed, the impact of fear on compliance was likely to have weakened, and the impact of trust to have strengthened. These hypotheses are tested using longitudinal data from Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Decision Responsiveness and the Legitimacy of Public Agencies
Ben Seyd, Alexandra Cichocka and Orestis Panayiotou
Parliamentary Affairs, 75:2, 2022 (link to article; details of the survey)
The procedural qualities of decisions made by public agencies are known to shape citizens’ perceptions of decision legitimacy. Existing empirical studies focus on procedures such as whether citizens are consulted, and whether their preferences are taken into account. Less is known about whether decisions made by public agencies are deemed legitimate if they reflect citizens’ broad interests rather than their immediate preferences. Yet many contemporary issues confront policy makers with dilemmas of whether to respond to citizens’ demands or instead to act on their interests. Using an experimental approach among a sample of British citizens, we analyse the effects on perceived legitimacy of various aspects of decision responsiveness. We focus in particular on whether public agencies are rewarded if they ignore citizens’ preferences while showing they are acting in their broader interests. Our results show that perceived legitimacy is indeed higher when decisions are seen to reflect citizens’ collective interests. But this boost disappears if individuals disapprove of the agency’s decision. We conclude that acting in citizens’ broad interests is unlikely to stimulate legitimacy among individuals who do not favour a decision’s outcome.

The Psychology of Supranationalism: Its Ideological Correlates and Implications for EU Attitudes and post‐Brexit Preferences
Linus Peitz, Kristof Dhont and Ben Seyd
Political Psychology, 39:6, 2018 (link)
Existing research highlights the roles of group identities and concerns about mass migration in explaining attitudes towards the European Union (EU). However, studies have been largely silent on whether EU attitudes are also shaped by people’s attitudes towards the principles and practices of supranational governance. This research provides a first test of the nature and role of supranational attitudes. We introduce a new measure of supranationalism and, in two studies using samples drawn from the British population, test the psychometric properties of the supranationalism scale. We then identify the socioideological correlates (right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation) of supranationalism, along with its effects in predicting EU attitudes and post‐Brexit preferences. Our core finding is that supranationalism predicts attitudes towards the EU over and above established factors such as national identity and immigrant threat. Our study thus shows the existence of supranational attitudes among individuals and the relevance of such attitudes to people’s opinions about international organizations like the EU.

How Might Reform of the Political System Appeal to Discontented Citizens?
Ben Seyd, John Curtice and Jonathan Rose.
British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 20:2, 2018 (Read article)
In Britain, levels of political trust have declined, stimulating policy makers to explore ways of appealing to discontented citizens. One such initiative involves reform of the political system. Yet this raises the question of which types of political reform are likely to appeal to discontented citizens. Existing studies have examined how individuals respond to political reforms, yet these studies only consider a limited range of institutional changes. Scholars and policy makers thus know little about the popular appeal of a wider set of institutional reforms. Taking advantage of proposals for political reform in Britain, this article considers public reactions to a wide range of institutional changes. Using data from the 2011 British Social Attitudes survey, we find that direct democratic reforms are not the only changes that appeal to discontented citizens. Instead, policy-makers may also appeal to the distrustful via reforms that allow voters more control over their political representatives.

Exploring Political Disappointment
Parliamentary Affairs, 69:2, 2016 (Read article)
Across western democracies, citizens are held to expect much of politicians, yet governments are supposed to be ill-equipped to deliver against those expectations. The net result is said to be a widespread sense of political disappointment; a negative balance between what citizens expect of government and what they perceive governments to deliver. Yet little attention has hitherto been paid to which kinds of citizens are particularly disappointed with politics, and why. This paper offers one of the first empirical analyses of political disappointment. Drawing on a survey conducted in Britain, it quantifies political disappointment and explores which social groups are more prone to disappointment than others. The analysis considers whether certain groups are more disappointed with politics by virtue of expecting a lot of government or by virtue of perceiving government performance in a particularly poor light.

How do Citizens Evaluate Politicians? The Role of Performance and Expectations in Shaping Political Trust
Political Studies, 63:s1, 2015 (Read article)
This article examines how citizens judge the trustworthiness of public officials, focusing on one aspect of the cognitive process by trust is assessed. It considers how far trust reflects not only the perceptions of how politicians behave but also prior expectations of that behaviour. ‘Expectancy-disconfirmation’ models suggest that attitudes to public services are largely shaped by performance perceptions adjusted for expectations. Drawing on survey data from a sample of citizens in the UK, the paper finds results that are inconsistent with this model. Instead, trust is found to primarily reflect performance perceptions alone; expectations play little additional role in shaping citizen evaluations. The results suggest that policy makers are unlikely to boost levels of political trust by reducing what citizens expect of politicians. Instead, policy makers concerned to improve their public image will have to undertake the harder task of improving their performance.

Using Economic Approaches to Analyse Institutional Reform in Britain
British Politics, 8:4, 2013 (Read article)
Over the last decade, the British state has been profoundly restructured. The reforms challenge scholars to develop accounts that can provide a unified analysis of the numerous changes and enable their effects to be identified. While the constitutional changes in Britain are the subject of an extensive literature, most of the studies focus on individual institutions and neglect the reforms’ collective nature and effects. To develop a more unified analysis of the reforms and their consequences, we need an account of what institutions are and of how they work. Economic analyses of institutions provide such an account, helping us to identify the common operating logics that underpin different institutions along with their effects. Insights from economic analyses are used to examine the recent institutional reforms in Britain, in particular how these reforms affect the distribution of decision making authority and the nature of political accountability.

Attitudes to Voting Rules and Electoral System Preferences: Evidence from the 1999 and 2003 Scottish Parliament Elections
John Curtice and Ben Seyd
Electoral Studies, 30:1, 2011 (Read article)
Electoral research has paid little attention to the way citizens evaluate different electoral systems. This reflects the limited knowledge citizens are presumed to have about alternative electoral arrangements. However, the establishment of a legislature elected under new electoral rules creates conditions in which citizens can make more informed judgements. Such a situation occurred with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, elected under the Additional Member system. Using data collected in 1999 and 2003, we consider Scottish voters' reactions to the new electoral rules. We examine evaluations of various features and outcomes of the rules, the structure of voters’ attitudes, and which aspects of electoral rules were decisive in shaping overall support for plurality and proportional voting systems.

Do Mayoral Elections Work? Evidence From London
John Curtice, Ben Seyd and Katarina Thomson
Political Studies, 56:3, 2008 (Read article)
The introduction of directly elected mayors represents a major reform of the operation of local government in Britain. Drawing upon survey data collected at the time of the first two London mayoral elections (2000 and 2004), this article considers whether such elections deliver the advantages claimed for them by their advocates. It addresses three questions: (i) What was the basis of public support for the new institutions, (ii) Who participated in the London elections, and why; and (iii) What accounts for voting behaviour in the London elections? In particular we examine how far the election of a single person executive helps provide people with a clear choice, encourages citizens to vote on the qualities of individual candidates rather than on their party affiliation, and motivates people to vote on distinctively local issues as opposed to national ones. Our results suggest that while mayoral elections deliver some of the advantages claimed for them, they may be less successful on others. The extent to which directly elected mayors enhance the local electoral process is thus doubtful.

EDITED BOOKS

Has Devolution Worked? The Verdict from Policy Makers and the Public
edited by John Curtice and Ben Seyd
Manchester University Press (2009)
Devolution to Scotland and Wales represented the most fundamental reform of the British state for almost a century. Ten years on, how successful has the reform been? The book is based on a wide ranging programme of research, examining the views and behaviour of citizens, elected representatives and interest groups. The results provide important new evidence on how devolution has been seen to have performed. What are its perceived achievements? What are its shortcomings? Is the new devolution ‘settlement’ stable, or is there a demand for further reform?

BOOK CHAPTERS

Constitutional Reform: A Recipe for Restoring Faith in our Democracy?
John Curtice and Ben Seyd
in Alison Park et al, eds, British Social Attitudes, the 29th Report, 2012 (Read chapter)
This chapter considers public attitudes towards various constitutional reforms planned or introduced by the current coalition government. It distinguishes between different types of institution - 'representative', 'executive' and 'direct' - and considers the contribution that each type of reform might have to re-engaging a sceptical electorate.