This is a living document and what you see is a draft excerpt from a paper soon to be submitted for publication.
What is Trust
Political trust has been an important focus of political research. It is at the nexus of many vital sectors: compliance with government policies, support for political leaders, satisfaction with the government, institutional performance, voting, taxing, & corruption – to name a few. Democratization & political development require sufficient political trust. It is unlikely for a society to develop strong institutions, effectively execute the rule of law, uphold democratic institutions, & maintain overall good governance.
Trust is the confidence & judgment that political actors & institutions are responsive to the needs of citizens, would be fair & just in the absence of constant scrutiny, and it depends on being able to hold actors accountable. Trustworthy institutions are perceived to be able to police themselves and not require oversight. When the state has proven its trustworthiness over time, they become legitimate in the eyes of the people, a crucial component of state-building, economic health, post-war development, and the long-term sustainability of any system of governance.
Social versus Political Trust
The peacebuilding literature largely delineates two main categories of trust, political – relating to overall governance, legal institutions, & the political system – and social, which includes civil society, culture, ethnicity, & society as a whole. In the context of violence and corruption, political trust is ‘an evaluative orientation toward the government based on ‘how well the government is operating according to the people’s normative expectations.’” Political trust is the societal manifestation of how people perceive their government due to performance, social equality, fairness, responsiveness, corruption, and other related concepts and is closely related to legitimacy. Political is trust in the local, subnational, & national governments (includes parliament, congress, & political parties), the institutions of governance (like the concept of Democracy as a whole), the integrity of elections, the executive leader (e.g., president, prime minister, monarch, et cetera), national security actors & the military, the judicial sector (includes judges, magistrates, court officials), local law enforcement, & state-run media. These categories can change depending on the system of governance and the local, subnational, or national scales.
Social trust complements political trust and covers interpersonal trust among individual citizens; trust citizens have for civil society, which contains non-governmental organizations and cultural, religious, ethnic, & social groups; and non-state media. Interpersonal trust is about people’s trust in other people, either in-group members or out-group members. Social trust is usually discussed in the context of social capital, bonding, bridging, linking, or positive attitudes in society at large.
Social trust is a precursor for all kinds of political trust. People trust those closest to them: immediate family members, followed by their friends & extended family, similar sociocultural groups, the local community, and then local government and national government. If people cannot trust those close to them, it is not easy to trust their government and political actors. Peace researchers have not studied political trust adequately as social trust.
Influences
Trust is reduced when people blame various political actors or institutions for socioeconomic factors like poverty & income inequality, violence, natural disasters, macroeconomic shocks, or recent scandals, or some other event. Blame erodes trust over time as poor conditions or chronic problems are left unabated. The general population is not satisfied with the status quo of their lives, which they attribute as shortcomings in political entities. Scandals, disasters, or other discrete events can also affect trust quickly all at once.
The distribution of blame is not equal in many cases. For example, citizens blame the executive leader more than the state’s institutions in a presidential system, but in a parliamentary system with more distributed power, the entire national government & all elected officials might equally receive the blame. The governance & structure of government matter. Whether the public blames certain political actors or none is also dependent on whether domestic or foreign factors cause the crisis or issue. Domestic problems shine a light or provide negative press for political actors, while a foreign policy issue can rally the people against an external enemy or distract people over domestic issues. When a disaster happens, it could be viewed as outside of the government’s control, and blame is assigned to other parties or none at all. Although trust might not be affected, public morale still could take a hit, reducing social trust and eventually also political trust, albeit indirectly. A recession or some external economic shock might not affect confidence in the entire government, although some specific political actors might receive the blame, whereas others might escape it entirely.
Of course, the actual event or scandal is a crucial factor, but it is greatly affected by how—or if—people learn about it. The lack of access to information, prevalent misinformation & propaganda, and media bias & coverage lead to confusion, warping blame & perception of a scandal or event, and foments mistrust in political actors & within society. In general, access to information influences whether a person will even hear about a scandal; if someone does not know about something, they cannot form an opinion. Media bias and total (negative or positive) coverage of a topic distort a person’s agency to develop well-informed opinions & mental models of an issue. Similarly, trust in media affects—a subset of social trust—affects whether people listen to or believe the news, which moderates access to information, further warping a person’s viewpoints of the event. If the distrust is strong, people might form views in direct opposition to the news coverage, similar to the political divide in the United States. Active misinformation (disinformation) and non-independent media (controlled by elites or political actors) can have a similar effect and tends to be targeted for specific political or economic means. They might use this propaganda to divert blame away from scandals, influence public favor to overcome low political capital, or support some policy.
Socioeconomic factors are significant influences on how citizens form opinions about political actors and institutions. Although, as strong as the effect may be, they often operate through intermediaries and other factors. General poverty & the lack of socioeconomic services give people the perception that the government cares little for their well-being, directly harming trust. People need to have confidence (closely related and in many cases synonymous with trust) in their government to capably provide essential socioeconomic services (e.g., law enforcement, health, education, sanitation, and economic opportunities, to name a few, depending on various social demands). Broadly, ineffective governance and poor government performance show the population that political actors cannot be trusted to maintain a certain level of well-being or do not care to. It signals that the government can’t maintain order, eventually harming legitimacy.
Geographic & demographic factors (e.g., urban versus rural, age, gender, location, ethnicity, et cetera) make strong predictors of political trust, mainly through their connection with other factors as an intermediary, conflating, or mediating effect. For example, geographic influences correlate to the number of violent attacks and the prevalence of organized crime, which are more direct predictors of trust. The proximity to an attack, problem, or scandal significantly affects how citizens disseminate blame—if at all. Their effects are not evenly distributed within a country and are more concentrated in certain locales, such as denser urban centers than others. The distribution of socioeconomic resources & services is another conflating variable with geopolitics in countries with low levels of equality. Demographic variables can be another predictor of political trust due to the tradition of ethnic favoritism in many African cultures and because ethnicity usually correlates with a geographic location in African countries. Geographic and demographic variables are strongly related to most other areas, but also themselves. There are many links between different demographic groups and their levels of trust in certain political actors, but that is likely indirect due to sociocultural differences, environmental factors, or some other intermediate effect in the causal chain.
Effects
The lack of trust is a detriment to good governance and the performance of government institutions, which propagate to all areas of society, especially socioeconomic services & well-being. A lack of trust translates into a lack of compliance, especially with its effect on tax revenue. When mistrust is focused on law enforcement & the judicial actors, enforcement capacity suffers increasing crime and reduces a person’s sense of security. A reduced enforcement capacity incentivizes tax evasion by making it more accessible, reducing government revenues, and as a result, resources needed to effectively perform institutional functions. With budgets for services spread too thin, quality and the overall effectiveness decline, further reducing political trust and signaling to the population that the government cannot effectively function, maintain well-being, nor cares about them.
Political trust has also been linked to civic engagement, social capital, & political expression, the political efficacy of the citizenry in sociopolitical matters, although the effect is likely indirect by acting through other areas. Regardless lower engagement reduces opportunities for cooperation, as does political expression does with people’s voice and influence in governmental matters, which can decrease accountability & transparency.
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