As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the roles that trust, belief in conspiracy theories, and spread of misinformation through social media play in impacting vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1476 adults in the UK between 12 and 18 December 2020, along with 5 focus groups conducted during the same period. Trust is a core predictor, with distrust in vaccines in general and mistrust in government raising vaccine hesitancy. Trust in health institutions and experts and perceived personal threat are vital, with focus groups revealing that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is driven by a misunderstanding of herd immunity as providing protection, fear of rapid vaccine development and side effects, and beliefs that the virus is man-made and used for population control. In particular, those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources—such as YouTube—that have recommendations tailored by watch history, and who hold general conspiratorial beliefs, are less willing to be vaccinated. Since an increasing number of individuals use social media for gathering health information, interventions require action from governments, health officials, and social media companies. More attention needs to be devoted to helping people understand their own risks, unpacking complex concepts, and filling knowledge voids.

As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the role that trust, belief in conspiracy theories and spread of misinformation through social media impact vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1,476 adults in the UK between December 12 to 18, 2020 and five focus groups conducted in the same period. Trust is a core predictor, with distrust in vaccines in general and mistrust in government raising vaccine hesitancy. Trust in health institutions and experts and perceived personal threat are vital, with focus groups revealing that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is driven by a misunderstanding of herd immunity as providing protection, fear of rapid vaccine development and side effects, belief the virus is man- made and related to population control. Particularly those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources such as YouTube that have recommendations tailored by watch history are less likely to be willing to become vaccinated. Those who hold general conspiratorial beliefs are less willing to be vaccinated. Since an increasing number of individuals use social media for gathering health information, interventions require action from governments, health officials and social media companies. More attention needs to help people understand their own risks, unpack complex concepts and fill knowledge voids.

There are three broad sets of qualities that citizens might expect politicians to display: competence, integrity and authenticity. To be authentic, a politician must be judged to be in touch with the lives and outlooks of ordinary people and previous research has suggested that this expectation has grown more prevalent in recent times. In this article, we use survey evidence from Britain – from citizens, parliamentarians and journalists – to explore which groups are prone to judge politicians by which criteria. While all groups give the highest absolute importance to integrity traits, we establish that distrusting citizens are significantly more likely to prioritise authenticity. For political elites and journalists, we find indications that authenticity is less valued than among citizens: politicians place more relative importance on integrity traits while journalists value competence most. We reflect on these findings and how they help us understand the growing crisis afflicting British politics.

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Asking citizens “the way democracy works” is the basis of a wide literature on the support citizens have for their political institutions and is one of the most common survey items in political science. Moreover, it is a key indicator for the purported global decline in legitimacy. Yet, its trends, levels, and dynamics are still debated, and conclusions may be erroneous. In this paper, we compile a unique global dataset between 1973 and 2018 encompassing all major cross-national datasets and national election studies in twelve countries to study the dynamics and consistency of “satisfaction with democracy” (SWD) measures globally. Our results show that while trends and between-country differences in democratic satisfaction are largely similar, the levels of satisfaction vary substantially between survey projects, and both trends and levels vary significantly in several widely studied countries. We show that this has consequences at the individual level: opting for one survey over another may alter our conclusions about the relationship between key demographics and SWD. Thus, researchers studying SWD should endeavor to consult diverse survey sources and should be cautious about their conclusions when they do not, especially when it comes to making claims about changes in SWD over time.

Voter turnout has been in a trend of gradual decline in most established democracies in recent decades and the reasons for this are by no means fully understood. While most studies agree that the trend is largely driven by younger generations voting less than older cohorts, the individual-level mechanisms of their declining propensity to vote are still disputed. A major distinction in the literature on democratic developments is that between theories of political apathy and political alienation: whether citizens are less interested in politics or still interested but instead estranged from their political systems. An interesting test for these different explanations can be found in Scandinavia: While Norway and Sweden have intimate historical, political and cultural similarities, Norway has been experiencing gradual turnout decline, while there has been no clear overall trend in Sweden. This study uses a combined dataset of over 50.000 respondents from 31 national election studies in these two countries from 1956-2013 to test the relative roles of apathy, alienation and generational dynamics in explaining these different trends in turnout. The results indicate that apathy has been declining while alienation has been rising in both countries. However, in Norway, those who are more apathetic today are much less likely to vote than apathetic citizens were in the past. The youngest generations are also significantly more apathetic and less likely to vote in Norway than in Sweden. These dynamics appear to account for the larger trend of turnout decline in Norway.

In recent decades, scholars and commentators have raised concerns about increasing citizen disengagement from politics, in particular from formal participation in liberal democracies. This trend is generally seen as indicative of declining public support for these regimes, but empirical analyses of the implications of disengagement are rare. This chapter looks at the relationship between disengagement and political trust across different types of engagement and regime. Disengagement from formal politics (voting) and cognitive engagement (political interest) are significantly related to lower levels of political trust in all regimes. Disengagement from extra-institutional politics (demonstrations) is associated with higher levels of trust, however, except at the aggregate level among liberal democracies. These results clarify the interaction of disengagement with political trust and potentially regime support, but a final interpretation must wait for a better understanding of change over time and to what extent younger generations of citizens engage and trust in different ways.