Trust in Political Science Research: Methods More Than Ideology

Political science tends to be among the least trusted scientific disciplines. Evidence on the sources of and remedies for this trust deficit is scarce and rarely tailored to political science. Using a representative survey of the Czech public (N = 1,530) and a parallel survey of Czech political scientists (N = 113), we examine the levels and sources of trust in the discipline from the perspectives of both the public and experts. Overall, trust is moderate and distrust is strongest among older, lower-income, and anti-Western respondents. Trust, however, is only weakly associated with ideology and perceptions of bias. In an embedded experiment, we show that open-science practices and methodological rigor significantly increase the perceived trustworthiness of political science research. Our findings underscore the need to build perceptions of competence, rigor, and transparency, and suggest that ideological bias may be a less central driver of distrust.