This article was written by Clara Colombatto (Research Fellow at UCL), Jim A.C. Everett (Reader at the University of Kent), Julien Senn (Senior Research Associate at the University of Zurich), Michel A. Maréchal (Professor at the University of Zurich) and M. J. Crockett (Associate Professor of Psychology & Center for Human Values, Princeton University).

  • The problem: Political leaders often mispredict public attitudes; for example, they overestimate public support for leaders who endorse nationalistic policies (e.g. hoarding vaccines for their own citizens vs. redistributing them globally).
  • Why it matters: These incorrect forecasts may lead politicians to pursue nationalistic policies and hoard resources – which is not just unjust but also has severe economic and health consequences.
  • The solution: These discrepancies between politicians' predictions and public opinion can be corrected with better education and communication; this will help political leaders implement more effective policies and garner political support.

In recent years, governments worldwide have seen a rise in nationalistic leadership – leading some to consider nationalism “the ideology of our age”. This rise in nationalistic approaches was especially evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, when in the face of severe resource shortages many countries adopted a “country-first” approach, hoarding resources rather than sharing them across the world. For example, wealthier countries purchased a surplus of vaccines as the pandemic started to spread – and still today vaccination rates in low-income countries are less than half compared to high-income countries. These “country-first” approaches not only generate stark inequalities across the globe but are also counterproductive: scientific studies have shown that inequalities in vaccination rates slow down our ability to fight the spread of viruses and reach herd immunity.

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Can policymakers forecast public attitudes?

One possible explanation for the rise of nationalistic policies is that political leaders fear that prioritising global wellbeing over their own citizens will reduce trust and even lose them votes – especially in times of crisis. As David Salisbury, a former director of immunisation for the British Department of Health said, “If your country develops the vaccine before anyone else, immediately exporting it to another country is not a vote-winner.” In our new work, now published in the journal Psychological Science, we demonstrate that policymakers indeed believe that the public will trust nationalistic leaders more than impartial ones. We seized a unique opportunity to sample a group of policymakers as part of a webinar we hosted on Apolitical. When we asked these policymakers to predict public attitudes about vaccine redistribution, most of them thought that the public would trust leaders more when they endorse nationalistic (vs. redistributive) vaccine policies.

Our work also exemplifies how experimental science can help recalibrate these misconceptions

But do people actually trust nationalistic leaders more than redistributive ones? To find out, we surveyed nationally representative samples in four countries with high vaccine surpluses (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and United States), and found that contrary to civil servants’ predictions, citizens mistrust leaders who advocate for nationalistic policies. This shows how politicians’ fears are misplaced: when choosing who to trust, the public prefers politicians who endorse redistribution of vaccines around the globe. In additional experiments, we also confirmed that this trust in redistributive leaders holds not just for Covid-19 vaccines, but also new threats such as the H5N1 influenza.

Our explorations of public perceptions of political leaders highlight how even experts can sometimes systematically misperceive public opinion. But our work also exemplifies how experimental science can help recalibrate these misconceptions — in this case, by showing how voicing support for global aid is not detrimental as experts believe, but can actually bolster politicians’ trustworthiness in the eye of the public.

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