Atle Hennum Haugsgjerd

• Winsvold, Marte Slagsvold; Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum; Saglie, Jo & Segaard, Signe Bock (2023). What makes people trust or distrust politicians? Insights from open-ended survey questions. West European Politics. 47(4), s. 759–783. doi: 10.1080/01402382.2023.2268459. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  High political trust is often interpreted as a sign of good democratic health, and widespread distrust as a sign of democratic ill health. However, there is little knowledge about the basis on which people make assessments about whether to trust or distrust political actors. This article develops and applies a typology for political trust judgement. Through a content analysis of 1,105 open-ended survey questions about political trust and distrust, the study finds that people tend to assess (dis)trust of politicians based on whether they see the politicians as predictable, intrinsically committed, competent and responsive. Moreover, the study finds that citizens use different judgement bases to describe trust and distrust, suggesting that the two concepts are not pure negations of each other. While predictability is the most frequently reported basis for trusting politicians, a lack of intrinsic commitment is the most frequently reported basis for distrusting politicians. This article discusses the reasons for and implications of the apparently different bases for weighing judgements on trust and distrust.

• Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (2023). Konklusjon: Politikk i urolige tider. I Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (Red.), Politikk i urolige tider. En studie av stortingsvalget 2021. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. s. 334–339.
• Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum & Linde, Jonas (2023). Hvilken type demokrati vil norske velgere ha? I Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (Red.), Politikk i urolige tider. En studie av stortingsvalget 2021. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. s. 180–203.
• Aalberg, Toril; Karlsen, Rune & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (2023). Kjønnsstereotypiske vurderinger av politisk kommunikasjon? I Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (Red.), Politikk i urolige tider. En studie av stortingsvalget 2021. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. s. 123–141.
• Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum; Karlsen, Rune & Aalberg, Toril (2023). Nyhetsbruk og politisk kunnskap i valgkamp. I Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (Red.), Politikk i urolige tider. En studie av stortingsvalget 2021. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. s. 103–122.
• Bergh, Johannes; Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum & Karlsen, Rune (2023). Stortingsvalget 2021: Velgerne går mot venstre. I Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (Red.), Politikk i urolige tider. En studie av stortingsvalget 2021. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. s. 13–29.
• Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum & Bergh, Johannes (2023). Explaining the Surge of the Populist Radical Right: A Time-Series Analysis of the Effects of Immigration and the Economy in Norway . Political Behavior. doi: 10.1007/s11109-023-09887-6. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Populist radical right parties have become major forces in most Western democracies. Previous research has provided conflicting evidence on whether their electoral support can be explained by two structural developments: economic decline and increased immigration. Using time-series regression and almost 30 years of aggregated monthly polling data, we perform a novel test of the effects of economic decline and immigration on aggregate support for the Norwegian Progress Party. We find that the most beneficial time-periods for this party seem to be those of rising immigration and a booming economy. However, our findings also suggest that the effect of rising immigration is halted when the party holds government office. Thus, voter mobilization based on anti-immigration messages may represent a challenge for the Norwegian Progress Party and potentially other such parties going forward as they may become victims of their own success.

• Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum; Karlsen, Rune & Steen-Johnsen, Kari (2023). Uninformed or Misinformed in the Digital News Environment? How Social Media News Use Affects Two Dimensions of Political Knowledge. Political Communication. doi: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2222070. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This article examines how the use of social media for news affects citizens’ knowledge about politics and current affairs. We employ a two-dimensional perspective on political knowledge and investigate how factual political knowledge, confidence in that knowledge, and misinformation, understood as the mismatch between factual political knowledge and confidence in knowledge, are related to social media news consumption. While earlier studies have suggested a negative relationship between social media news consumption and factual knowledge, there are indications that social media use may give people a general sense of being informed, even when they are not. Such general subjective knowledge might, however, differ from confidence in retrieved facts. Drawing on a two-wave panel study from Norway, we find evidence of a negative relationship between social media news consumption and both dimensions of knowledge. Notably, however, we do not find that social media news use leads to confidence in incorrect beliefs, suggesting that the digital media environment produces an uninformed, but not an overconfident, misinformed news audience.

• Finseraas, Henning; Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum & Kumlin, Staffan (2023). Immigration and welfare state sustainability: whose perception is affected by fiscal cost cues? Journal of European Public Policy. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2166572. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Who reacts politically to fiscally costly immigration? A political economy tradition holds that reactions depend on economic self-interest, whereas a social psychology tradition emphasizes generalized political orientations and trust. Past work largely leans in favor of the latter tradition. We make three contributions. First, our dependent variable is a concrete perception of welfare state sustainability, arguably better suited to capture self-interest. Second, both the political economy- and social psychology traditions have been studied narrowly; we separate between multiple interests (including economic local context), and compare several types of trust orientations. Third, we use machine learning methods well-suited to analyze treatment heterogeneity in a randomized survey experiment. We find support for both interest-based and social psychological explanations. As for the latter, what matters is not only, or even mainly, orientations/trust related to immigration. Rather, generalized political distrust strongly regulates when costly immigration cues trigger welfare sustainability worries.

• Langsæther, Peter Egge; Goubin, Silke & Haugsgjerd, Atle (2022). Subverted expectations and social democratic austerity: How voters’ reactions to policies are conditional on the policy-implementing actor. Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy. 80. doi: 10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102529. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  It is well-established that voters care about policies when they go to the voting booth. However, we argue that voters' reaction to the policies are conditional on the actor implementing them. Voters have different expectations towards political parties regarding the policies they are expected to implement, and subverted expectations can have electoral consequences. This is particularly the case when they are related to issues central to the party's ideological agenda. We supply experimental evidence of this in the case of social-democratic austerity policies: Left-wing voters punish social democrats much more for implementing such policies than they punish a mainstream right party for the same actions. Our findings have important implications for several ongoing debates in the literature such as the demise of social democratic parties in the wake of the Great Recession, the interplay between parties and citizens, as well as the general effect of austerity on electoral outcomes.

• Haugsgjerd, Atle & Karlsen, Rune (2022). Election Campaigns, News Consumption Gaps, and Social Media: Equalizing Political News Use When It Matters? The International Journal of Press/Politics. doi: 10.1177/19401612221112014. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  We investigate how inequalities in political media use develop throughout election campaigns, and in particular whether social media use helps counterbalance traditional news consumption gaps. Using a four-wave individual-level panel survey of the Norwegian 2017 national election campaign, we run a series of latent growth models to investigate whether differences in news consumption based on gender, age, education, and political interest increase or decrease during campaigns. We find that news consumption gaps are either stable or converge throughout the campaign. Importantly, social media provides political information to those groups that use traditional media channels the least and thereby reduce overall gaps in political media consumption. In this way, election campaigns, to some extent, equalize inequalities in political news consumption when it matters the most.

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• Bergh, Johannes & Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum (2023). Politikk i urolige tider. En studie av stortingsvalget 2021. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. 344 s.

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• Haugsgjerd, Atle Hennum & Nadim, Marjan (2023). Et mer polarisert samfunn? Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning. 64(3), s. 249–251. doi: 10.18261/tfs.64.3.4.
• Nordø, Åsta Dyrnes & Haugsgjerd, Atle (2022). Do inclusive integration policies soften immigration scepticism?
• Haugsgjerd, Atle; Karlsen, Rune; Steen-Johnsen, Kari & Beyer, Audun (2022). Less Informed and Less Confident Citizens: Social Media, Retrieval Accuracy and Confidence in Political Knowledge.
• Haugsgjerd, Atle & Nadim, Marjan (2022). Innledning til spesialnummer om 22. juli‑kommisjonen. Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning. 63(3), s. 169–171.
• Winsvold, Marte Slagsvold; Haugsgjerd, Atle; Saglie, Jo & Segaard, Signe Bock (2022). What makes people trust or distrust politicians? A qualitative approach using open-ended survey questions. Vis sammendrag

  Research on political trust typically uses closed-ended survey questions that ask citizens how much they trust political actors, without defining the concept of trust. However, to say something about the consequences of political (dis)trust, we need to know what trust and distrust actually mean to people. Inspired by Van der Meer’s classification of judgement bases for political trust—competence, intrinsic and extrinsic commitment, and predictability—we analysed the responses to two open-ended survey questions about political trust and distrust. We found that Van der Meer’s trust criteria are relevant, but not exhaustive. We suggest a new category—responsiveness—to be added to the typology. Moreover, we found that citizens use different judgement bases to describe trust and distrust, suggesting that the two concepts are not pure negations of each other. While predictability is the basis most frequently reported for trusting politicians, lack of intrinsic commitment is the most frequently reported basis for distrusting politicians.

• Haugsgjerd, Atle (2021). En europeisk vänstersväng? Om det norska valet.
• de Blok, Lisanne & Haugsgjerd, Atle (2021). Take a Chance on Me: Experienced Risk and Political Trust.
• Finseraas, Henning; Haugsgjerd, Atle & Kumlin, Staffan (2021). Immigration Cues and Perceived Welfare State Sustainability: Understanding Variability in Political Reactions to Fiscally Costly Immigration.

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