Abstract
The article discusses a new method for measuring politicians' trustworthiness. This method is based on indirect questioning and it builds on the hypothesis that the more trustworthy a politician is, the more people will agree with his statements and consider them seriously.
The principle of the method is inspired by the matched-guise technique used in sociolinguistics and it investigates respondents' evaluation of a set of fictitious quotations associated with a set of politicians' names. More socially equivalent groups are examined and for each group, name of each politician is associated with a different quotation.
The paper presents a pilot experiment utilizing this method (N=190). Altogether, 20 statistically significant results were obtained.
This means the method could be one of the keys for a better understanding of such a complex notion as is the trustworthiness of politicians in the future.