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  • Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent - giving voters a chance to 'have their say' - can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum - those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 - became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust. (xsd:string)
?:citation
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?:dateModified
  • 2023 (xsd:gyear)
?:datePublished
  • 2023 (xsd:gyear)
?:doi
  • 10.1111/1475-6765.12531 ()
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  • en (xsd:string)
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?:issn
  • 0304-4130 ()
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  • 1 (xsd:string)
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  • Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment (xsd:string)
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  • Zeitschriftenartikel (xsd:string)
  • journal_article (en)
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  • GESIS-SSOAR (xsd:string)
  • In: European Journal of Political Research, 62, 2023, 1, 308-325 (xsd:string)
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?:urn
  • urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-98346-2 ()
?:volumeNumber
  • 62 (xsd:string)