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Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens' trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to 'have their say' – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)‐invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi‐experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust‐inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent‐triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust‐inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May‐led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left‐wing or non‐Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy influence of political parties is a classic subject of investigation in political science research. The typical conclusion is that parties influence policy only through government: The government controls the legislative process and has the parliamentary majority to legislate; the opposition is shut out. Yet the legislative process is merely the final part of a much longer policy process starting with an agenda‐setting phase that decides the issues of political conflict in the first place. This study proposes an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence which hypothesises sizable opposition policy influence through agenda‐setting: A government is likely to adopt legislation covering the opposition's position in order to silence opposition agenda‐setting. The model is tested on the manual coding of 316 Acts of Parliament adopted by the government and 26,533 Prime Minister's Questions from the Opposition across six issues in Britain (1979‒2015). The results have important implications for minority representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]