Public trust is essential to democratic governance, yet many democracies face declining confidence in political institutions, driven by unmet expectations and perceived misconduct. Institutional ‘guardrails’, such as anti-corruption bodies, election commissions, and federal checks and balances, are designed to expose and sanction wrongdoing, thereby supporting trust. However, psychological research suggests trust repair may rely more on relational cues like apologies and atonement than on institutional enforcement. Despite high normative expectations on guardrails, little is known about the conditions under which they succeed in supporting or repairing public trust, or when they backfire. 

This paper examines how and when institutional guardrails effectively support public trust. Drawing on rational choice and social psychology perspectives, we field a representative survey with an embedded vignette experiment in Australia (N = 7,000). The factorial design manipulates the type of trust breach, the design of the guardrail institution, and the responses of both the guardrail and the implicated actor. We estimate average treatment effects on perceived trustworthiness of the guardrail and assess how this moderates the impact on institutional and diffuse trust. Our findings advance theoretical debates on trust repair and offer practical insights for designing institutions that can sustain public trust amid perceived failures or misconduct.

Dr Max Grömping is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University and is currently a visiting researcher at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. He studies the dynamics of policy lobbying and advocacy under different political regimes, and how information disorder affects public trust. He co-leads two Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Projects on Public Interest Advocacy in Australian Policymaking, and on Mapping & Harnessing Public Mistrust. His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Political Communication, Policy Sciences, Governance, and PNAS, among others. He is co-editor of Lobbying the Autocrat (University of Michigan Press, 2023) and Associate Editor of Democratisation.