The Influence of Perceived Inconsistency in Communication of Politicians on Trust in Government in the Netherlands.

Political trust is of high importance for stable and legitimate democracies such as the Netherlands. Due to the digital era, political communication takes place across many different platforms, where information can seem inconsistent to citizens. This thesis aims to research the influence of perceived inconsistency in political communication on political trust in the Netherlands. While political trust has already been widely discussed in the literature, the influence of perceived inconsistency is underexplored. This thesis contributes to filling this gap. A quantitative survey (N=142) has been conducted among Dutch citizens. The results show that citizens who perceive contradictory messaging depending on either the platform, such as inconsistency between parliamentary debates and talk shows on TV, or over time, for example, before and after the elections, report lower levels of political trust. Political trust is also significantly and negatively influenced by the perceived competence of the leader and this has a stronger effect than perceived inconsistency. The other independent and control variables, age, gender, income, education, quality of policy, efficiency of public services and the media are not significant. The independent variables economic situation and corruption had to be dropped from the data analysis due to a low Cronbach Alpha. Limitations of this thesis are a relatively low number of respondents and the fact that only one question is used to measure the dependent variable political trust. During the next research more attention ought to be given to the operationalization and finding scales for the survey that are relevant to the country and time that is being researched. This thesis ends with several recommendations, such as politicians appointing a communication specialist who ensures consistency in political messaging so that political trust in society will increase.