Trust and Citizens’ Evaluations of Promise Keeping by Governing Parties

This study examines citizens’ evaluations of promise keeping and breaking. We focus on two aspects of trust as explanations of citizens’ evaluations.

When trust is defined in terms of mistrust, it implies that vigilant and well-informed citizens base their evaluations on what governments deliver. When trust is defined in terms of distrust, it implies that citizens use heuristic thinking when evaluating governing parties’ performance, regardless of what those parties do. Our evidence is from a survey experiment in the British Election Study, which asked respondents to evaluate whether governing parties fulfilled specific election pledges made during the previous election campaign.