Expectation management: can politicians win back political trust by limiting what the public expects of them?

Politicians may be feverishly campaigning for votes, but fewer and fewer citizens say they trust them and the institutions they inhabit. In this post, Ben Seyd considers what politicians can do to strengthen the public’s confidence in their work. He suggests that trust may not be responsive to the expectations that people have of politicians; instead, trust seems more affected by perceptions of how well politicians are seen to perform. Boosting the public’s trust might therefore require improving political performance rather than simply limiting what the public expects of its elected representatives.