Trust in action: Cooperation, information, and social policy preferences

Abstract

What happens to peoples' social‐policy preferences when their expectations concerning collective behavior are met, or even exceeded? And what conversely occurs when these expectations are unmet, and trust is thereby breached? Drawing on the first Italian COVID‐19 lockdown as a massive exercise in collective action, this study tests how information on lockdown‐compliance rates causally affects the social‐policy preferences of Italian voters, conditional on their pretreatment levels of trust. Examining social‐policy preferences across multiple dimensions, we find that trust is most closely linked to attitudes towards transfer generosity, as opposed to preferences on policy universalism and conditionality. Results highlight that neutral, fact‐based information on cooperation levels can affect social‐policy preferences—and that the direction of attitude change depends on whether one's trust has been met or breached.