Political Trust and Redistribution Preferences

How does political trust influence policy preferences? A large literature posits that trust is vital for supporting governments in managing fundamental societal challenges and investing in long-term policy making. This paper investigates the relationship between political trust and policy preferences, specifically redistribution preferences. Through four pre-registered, original survey experiments conducted over two years in the UK and long-term panel data spanning 19 years in Switzerland, I demonstrate that political trust has an insignificant and negligible impact on individuals’ preferences for redistribution, even when trust is experimentally manipulated under theoretically favourable conditions. By combining two designs with improved causal identification than the existing literature, these results challenge prevailing theories linking political trust and policy preferences and highlight the need for further examination of the complex dynamics between citizens’ attitudes and support for government policy.