Research
My research brings together two questions: how to restore trust in democracy, and how to advance the quality of governance. It develops along five connected lines.
1. Restoring trust in democracy
My current agenda asks how institutions can rebuild trust once it has eroded. The Ramón y Cajal project Restoring Trust in Democracies (2027–2031) and a new comparative project on trust repair in Spain and Poland examine whether trust is better repaired from within institutions or from above, through external oversight and reform.
2. Democratic qualities and the quality of governance
Public organizations hold growing power, which raises the question of how accountable, transparent, participatory and representative they are. I have developed a measurement model and cross-national database of the democratic qualities of public bodies (Policy & Politics, 2022, 2025), and applied this approach to local government through the Local Democracy Index and to the Israeli public service.
3. What drives trust in public institutions
This line examines how citizens, stakeholders and elites form trust in public agencies. It includes a systematic review of how trust is measured (Regulation & Governance, 2024), a six-country experiment on enforcement style (JPART, 2024), a cross-national elite experiment (European Political Science Review, 2024), a study of trust and distrust in governance relations (Journal of Trust Research, 2024) and work on stakeholder trust (Journal of European Public Policy, 2026).
4. Trust ecologies and democratic performance
Trust in government, in markets and in other people rarely moves together. I study how gaps between these forms of trust shape democratic performance, and how communication can affect trust in the European Union and in central banks.
5. Compliance and voluntary cooperation
This work asks when people and firms comply voluntarily, including how ideological polarization limits the effectiveness of self-regulation (Regulation & Governance, 2025) and how different governance regimes affect trust in firms (Journal of European Public Policy, 2022).