Field Experiments Examining Trust in Law: Interviewer Effects on Participants with Lower Educational Backgrounds

Abstract

An important prerequisite for democratic societies to function smoothly is that citizens put trust in the law and as such trust the judges in their country. Therefore, whether various participants actually trust the law is an important topic in many different studies. The current paper notes that insights into trust in law among lower educated participants is relatively lacking. We further note that there is a possibility that levels of trust in law may vary in important ways among participants with lower educational backgrounds as a function of who is conducting the research. Three field experiments tested this assumption. Results of all three experiments show that, when completing questionnaires given to participants by interviewers presenting themselves as coming from law schools, participants with lower educational backgrounds indicated that they hold higher levels of trust in their country’s judges than when the same interviewers presented themselves as coming from regional community colleges. Taken together, these findings indicate a robust phenomenon overlooked thus far in the literature, namely that trust in the judiciary can vary systematically among citizens with lower educational backgrounds as a function of interviewer affiliation. Implications on how to understand this phenomenon are discussed.

Keywords

• trust
• interviewer effects
• participants with lower-educational backgrounds
• empirical legal research
• experiments