How institutional distrust breeds one-sided leadership: A consistency-based account

Declining institutional trust across democracies raises pressing questions about its social consequences. We examine how institutional distrust shapes leadership preferences. We propose that institutional distrust creates a dissonant state. When institutions are seen as violating normative expectations of benevolence, individuals experience cognitive conflict between distrusting institutions and believing that they ought to serve the public interest. We argue that such a conflict heightens the need for cognitive consistency, which in turn increases preferences for leaders who express one-sided, unambivalent stances. We test this account across five sets of studies conducted in eight countries. Studies 1A and 1B establish that institutional distrust elicits cognitive conflict and that this effect is stronger among individuals who strongly believe that institutions should act in the best interest of all. Studies 2A, 2B, and 2C demonstrate that cognitive conflict mediates the effect of institutional distrust on the need for cognitive consistency using experimental designs and cross-national samples, with Study 2C further examining self-relevance as a moderator. Studies 3A and 3B show that heightened need for cognitive consistency predicts stronger preferences for one-sided leaders. Studies 4A and 4B provide evidence for the full serial mediation model across experimental and correlational designs. Finally, Study 5 uses reverse correlation to demonstrate that under institutional distrust, the mental representation of a prototypical leader appears more one-sided. Together, these findings identify cognitive consistency as a key mechanism through which rising institutional distrust reshapes leadership preferences. More broadly, they support cognitive dissonance theory by identifying its process in one topical context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).