In Governments We Trust: A Two-Country Brexit Field Experiement on Perceived Uncertainty as Mediator for Consumer Decisions

For several years, the Brexit has been an ongoing political crisis with high uncertainty that nonetheless affects us in many ways. Until now, the academic debate has mainly emphasized the political, economic and legal consequences, while disregarding the social-psychological effects of the crisis. This article examined the relationships between trust in UK and EU government and perceived uncertainty, and how these relationships affected consumers’ choices (i.e., travelling decisions). We assessed these relationships in a two-country Brexit field experiment (UK and Germany; N = 1,228) confirming moderation by country differences, where trust in one’s own government has a weaker impact. In turn, the soft and hard Brexit scenarios moderated these country differences: for the British sample, the effect of trust in the EU government is stronger for a hard Brexit, while Germans showed a reversed and counterintuitive structure for trust in the UK government.