Feelings of trust, distrust and risky decision-making in political office. An experimental study with national politicians in three democracies

Tackling an important gap in the literature on political trust, this article focuses on politicians and the relevance of their other-to-self trust judgements for decision-making in public office. A unique quantitative dataset gathered from national politicians in the UK, Canada and South Africa is used to (1) examine descriptive levels of felt trust and distrust among politicians and (2) evaluate the impact of these feelings on politicians’ risky decision-making. To achieve outcome (2), this article presents the results of three survey experiments in which politicians were asked to make decisions in scenarios where both the presentation and the nature of risk varied. The results indicate that MPs’ perceptions of public trust and distrust do matter for risky decision-making, and that these variables moderate a reflection effect whereby MPs are otherwise more risk-averse in the face of gains and risk-taking in the face of losses.