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19 Utrecht L. Rev. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/utrecht19 and id is 1 raw text is: UtrechtL .w-.I  e

0010

An important prerequisite for democratic societies to function smoothly is that citizens
put trust in the law and as such trust the judges in their country. Therefore, whether
various participants actually trust the law is an important topic in many different
studies. The current paper notes that insights into trust in law among lower educated
participants is relatively lacking. We further note that there is a possibility that levels
of trust in law may vary in important ways among participants with lower educational
backgrounds as a function of who is conducting the research. Three field experiments
tested this assumption. Results of all three experiments show that, when completing
questionnaires given to participants by interviewers presenting themselves as coming
from law schools, participants with lower educational backgrounds indicated that they
hold higher levels of trust in their country's judges than when the same interviewers
presented themselves as coming from regional community colleges. Taken together,
these findings indicate a robust phenomenon overlooked thus far in the literature,
namely that trust in the judiciary can vary systematically among citizens with lower
educational backgrounds as a function of interviewer affiliation. Implications on how
to understand this phenomenon are discussed.

Kees van den Bos
Utrecht University, NL
trust; interviewer effects;
participants with lower-
educational backgrounds;
empirical legal research;
experiments
Van den Bos, Kees, Liesbeth
Hulst, Marianne Robijn, Sietske
Romijn and Thijs Wever, 'Field
Experiments Examining Trust
in Law: Interviewer Effects
on Participants with Lower
Educational Backgrounds'
(2023) 19(1) Utrecht Law
Review 1-19. DOI: