Trust in politicians and institutions is falling across much of the democratic world. Recent research across all democracies suggests trust in parliaments may have dropped by 9 percentage points from 1990 to 2019. 72% of Americans born before World War II rate living in a democracy as "essential"; among millennials, the number is only around 30%.

From the US to Europe and Australia, voters increasingly question whether leaders can deliver on their promises or whether institutions are strong enough to hold them accountable. Recent research from UNSW Sydney argues that this distrust does more than influence elections. It can shape what democracy is capable of achieving.

“Most democracies have similar institutions. And yet some manage to achieve much more than others. Where less is achieved, this is often not because there is no politician who proposes to do ambitious things, but rather because voters do not trust their promises,” says Gabriele Gratton, Professor of Politics and Economics in the UNSW Business School, an ARC Future Fellow, and founder and co-director of the UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab.

Prof. Gratton’s latest research paper, Bad Democracy Traps, co-authored by UNSW Business Senior Lecturer Dr Hasin Yousaf and UNSW Business PhD alumnus Barton E. Lee, examines how political culture, specifically voters’ beliefs about politicians and institutions, affects democratic performance.

The ‘trap’ of low expectations

“We often hear voters lamenting that all their politicians are corrupt liars and that judges and media are in cahoots with them,” said Prof. Gratton. However, the problem is that this distrust of politicians and government institutions – entities intended to serve and protect the public interest – can become self-reinforcing.

“In our research, we argue that this may be part of the problem: if we believe politicians are corrupt liars and there is nobody holding them in check, then we’re never going to vote for politicians who make more ambitious and more risky promises.”

The research consisted of two parts. First, the authors built a game-theoretic model to understand how trust in politicians and institutions shapes voters' choices and the policies pursued. The model shows that if people believe politicians are dishonest and that institutions are weak, they avoid supporting bold, long-term policies, and because those policies are never tried, voters never get evidence that might change their minds.

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Second, the researchers tested part of this idea with an online survey experiment involving about 3000 US voters. Participants were randomly allocated to treatments showing factual information about corruption and then asked about their expectations of politicians and ambitious policies. The results show that new information can shift people’s beliefs, especially about risky, long-term reforms.

Even if institutions are functioning reasonably well, negative beliefs can limit what voters are willing to support in the long run, the authors conclude. “And this is the case even if in fact our politicians may not be so bad, after all, and even if judges and media are doing a reasonably good job at keeping them accountable,” said Prof. Gratton.

He compared the situation to hiring a contractor. “If you believe all home renovators are a scam and there is no judge coming to help when they do their job poorly, then you are going to be much less inclined to redo your kitchen. But since you never try, you never learn if the renovators are indeed all a scam. That’s why this is a cultural ‘trap’,” he said.

Why ambitious policies need trust

According to Prof. Gratton, ambitious policies are especially vulnerable to low trust because they are risky and harder to evaluate. “Some political promises are easier to monitor than others. If a politician promises to reform education so that kids will learn to be smarter and more efficient adult workers, we may need to wait years before any report on whether indeed this is working,” he said.

Learn more: The UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab

Even well-designed, ambitious reforms can fail because the problems they address are complex. “And even if a reform fails to achieve its promises, it may well be that all the intentions were good and it’s just that education in a fast-changing world is a really tough problem to tackle: even well-designed reforms may fail – it’s a risky business,” he said.

“The greater the ambition of the policy, the more the risk, the harder-to-monitor the results, the more it requires a lot of trust in politicians who promise them. On the contrary, short-term pork-barrel politics requires little trust: if politicians do not deliver within a single election cycle, we voters know what to do to set them straight.”

Information, shocks and democratic resilience

The research also examined how information affects political culture. Prof. Gratton said information can reshape voters’ beliefs in powerful ways. “It tells us that information can be transformative. However, this can be a bad thing as much as a good thing,” he said.

“It can inform voters that their institutions are better than they think, that politicians are held accountable and therefore can be trusted. Yet, it can also plunge a wishful-thinking democracy into despair.”

He pointed to Italy in the 1990s as an example. “One may wonder whether Italy was the best example of government in the world or not, but there is no doubt it was, for decades, an economic growth miracle and experienced political and economic stability. Then a major corruption scandal, following an investigation known as Operation ‘Clean Hands’, destroyed the reputation of almost all traditional parties and politicians,” he said.

Asked about the state of democracy today, Prof. Gratton said many voters are questioning whether democratic systems can still deliver. “Voters in Europe, America, Australia, perhaps most of the democratic world are struggling to hold on to the belief that liberal democratic institutions can deliver on their promises: inclusive prosperity and justice for all,” he said.

“It’s not surprising that voters may be losing trust in democracy, especially the younger generations. And you see this quite clearly in the data, as well as in the voters’ choices in the polls,” he said. “In terms of our model, this corresponds to an awakening from a wishful thinking democracy. But I am optimistic we can fine-tune democracy to the 21st Century and improve our institutions before we fall into a bad democracy trap.”

Prof. Gratton said this is why it's important that places like the UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab, which aims to turn research into practical institutional tools, exist. “The UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab is a unique environment where economists, political scientists and comparative constitutional lawyers come together to translate what we discover about processes of democratic erosion into actual legal instruments to make democracy less prone to erosion in the first place,” he said.

“That is why we are a ‘Lab’: we test ideas and theories and build prototypes and tools for designing better institutions. But I believe in politics more than in experts like me. Ultimately, our tools can only work if political leaders are willing and able to take them into their hands and use their political ability to actually change society for the better. Politicians without the right tools can only do worse. But the right tools without the right political leader are not useful either.”