Political trust and online information in contemporary Britain

Abstract

Public trust and confidence in the UK government and politicians are at a record low (Curtice, Montagu and Sivathasan, 2024) and MPs are widely regarded as less trustworthy than people in all other occupations (YouGov, 2024b). How do citizens make such judgements about their elected representatives? What role does online information play in this process? And what steps could MPs and governments take towards rebuilding trust? In this thesis I present three papers that address these important questions. In the first paper, I focus on how MPs’ Facebook posts influence citizens’ decisions about trustworthiness. Drawing on a novel combination of content analysis and survey research I offer a unique insight into how trustworthiness is conveyed on social media and how the attributes of competence, integrity and authenticity are communicated. I identify typical styles of content posted by MPs and highlight key features of high- and low- trust Facebook posts. In the second paper, I use a series of focus groups held in one of the UK’s ‘forgotten towns’ to explore the evaluative process in more depth. I observe that almost all participants start from a default position of distrust and then employ a range of different decision-making strategies to identify the least untrustworthy politicians. Based on these discussions, I offer a new model for decision-making in a low-trust political environment. In the third paper, I turn to the role of independent regulation in supporting trust. I conduct two pre-registered survey experiments and find that making MPs’ remuneration more salient has a significant negative effect on trust. Highlighting the role of the regulator mitigates this to some extent but does not improve perceptions about the fairness of pay and expenses. The findings suggest that public engagement on the topic of MPs’ salary and benefits could be counterproductive in relation to trust and that regulation does not provide a simple solution to the trust crisis. Taken together, the three papers offer original insights about the way that citizens make judgements on trust, and how online information – whether on social media or published by the regulator – may affect such judgements. Building on these insights I offer recommendations for steps that could be taken towards rebuilding trust, addressing a gap in existing literature (Weinberg, 2024b).  

Date of Award	24 Jun 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Sponsors	Economic and Social Research Council
Supervisor	Peter Allen (Supervisor) & Iulia Cioroianu (Supervisor)