Read a paper coauthored with Andreas Baumann (Municipality of Copenhagen) on: Trust influences preference for religious politicians Abstract: Democratic elections pose a two-dimensional problem for voters; the voter wants to maximise ideological congruity while simultaneously maximising the personal qualities of the candidate such as passion, trustworthiness or intelligence. We illustrate this problem by studying the role of religion in politics. The stark difference in the importance of religion in national politics between the United States and Western Europe is often explained by the varying intensity of religious engagement in civil life: Americans elect more religious leaders because they are more religious. However, in this paper, we suggest a complementary mechanism: given the high diversity and low trust of the contemporary United States, religious posturing may function as a signal of trustworthiness. Using cross-national data from the European Values Survey, we show that distrust causes preference for religious leaders. We expand this into a more fully-fledged model of the interplay between trust, political preference and religiosity and elaborate on how this may provide additional insights into the role of religion in politics across the globe.