Tracking Political Trust: Insights from UK and Japan
Published: 26 April 2024
Research insight
Political trust in advanced democracies, including the UK and Japan, has faced significant challenges, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In response Professor Thomas Scotto from the School of Social and Political Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues from Japan, developed a 'trust monitor.'
Political trust or the faith that citizens have in specific politicians, political institutions, and the overall system is under strain in advanced representative democracies. Political trust was further strained during the pandemic and concerns over further erosion of trust was deemed by stakeholders within both the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to warrant further study.
Responding to the joint call for proposals from UK and Japan based teams, co-PI Professor Thomas Scotto of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences. along with UK colleagues at Brunel, Essex and Exeter teamed up with Japanese based colleagues at Kobe University in Japan have developed a “trust monitor.” These monthly samples of a representative group of English and Japanese adults track the dynamics of various forms of trust over time, and how they correlate with, among other things, attitudes towards the legacy of the COVID-19 crisis.
To make their data transparent and usable by those with an interest in political trust, the investigators launched “trusttracker.org.” Those interested can not only receive reports of project findings, but they can analyse the monthly data for themselves using an “interactive tool” that allows users to plot charts tracking the forms of trust over time as well as run basic statistical manipulations linking political trust to other variables measured in the surveys such as the respondents’ willingness to receive a Covid-19 vaccination. To date, monthly surveys of Japanese and English respondents are available from July 2022 to March 2023, with additional months to be added shortly. When the project concludes in early 2025, there will be a total of 24 monthly surveys with at least 12000 respondents from each country.
To date, early investigations of the data yield several interesting insights. At a time where the Met Police is under scrutiny following a series of high-profile violence against women by serving officers, the team finds that trust in the police among women residing in London is significantly lower than it is in England’s other regions. A paper detailing the findings appears in Policing and Society, and a diverse array of media outlets including the Guardian and Daily Mail reported on the research.
In contrast to the police force, the team finds that despite problematic waiting times and post COVID-19 strains on the service, the NHS remains a highly trusted institution among Englanders. A paper appearing in Public Health in Practice reports results showing that regional A&E waiting times and wait times for cancer referrals has no impact on whether a survey respondent trusts the NHS. A companion paper by principal investigator Dr Steve Pickering of the University of Amsterdam and Martin Hansen of Brunel appearing in Nursing Inquiry finds that support for striking junior doctors and nurses is higher than that of any other major highly unionized profession in England.
The team currently is pursuing additional studies of the data including measuring the role of religion in Covid-19 vaccine uptake in England, trust in AI and Smartmeters, and the drivers of individual-level support for migration among Japanese and English voters.
Future project updates and data releases will appear on trusttracker.org.
First published: 26 April 2024