Explaining the educational gradient in trust in politicians: a video-vignette survey experiment

Many liberal democracies are characterised by strong educational gradients in political trust: less-educated citizens have strikingly less trust in politicians than more-educated citizens. Informed by a wide body of research, this study tests systematically the empirical relevance of three characteristics of politicians that have been theorised as explanations for the educational gradient in trust in politicians: (1) substantive cultural stances (progressiveness/conservatism); (2) (non-)populist rhetoric; and a recently developed explanation, (3) perceived distance to citizens’ life-worlds. This study analyses data from an original, pre-registered, video-vignette survey experiment carried out among a high-quality, representative panel in the strategic case of the Netherlands, where respondents were assigned randomly to one of 16 professionally produced videos of an actor playing the role of a fictitious politician. It was found that the politician’s cultural stances and use of (non-)populist rhetoric were important drivers of the educational gradient in trust in the politician.