There is a vast research tradition on the topic of political trust, which is traditionally considered as a form of diffuse support for the political system. Despite all this research, questions about how exactly to conceptualize political trust remain, as it can be easily assumed that not all active politicians will be equally trustworthy. On a more fundamental level, it has also been claimed that political trust is a rather traditional and even obsolete concept thanks to the emergence of new generations of “critical citizens,” a term coined by Pippa Norris almost a quarter of a century ago.
In her latest book, In Praise of Skepticism, Norris brings together decades of experience and research to formulate a nuanced solution to the theoretical puzzle of political trust. Basically, her argument is that the concept of political “trust,” as such, is morally neutral: trust is not always a positive attitude. If one is to consider the value of trust, it has to be positively related to “trustworthiness,” and in that case, it can obviously lead to a constructive form of cooperation. But the consequences of trust can be equally disastrous, as when we express trust toward those who did not earn it, or who may have the intention of abusing our trust. This, of course, shifts the research question to when exactly politicians or political systems can be considered “trustworthy” (operationalized based on the qualities of competence, impartiality, and integrity, all features that should be accessible and intelligible to citizens). One might wonder, however, whether citizens are always fully motivated to reach such a judgment: one might think of objective criteria to judge the qualities of political leaders, but in polarized times, partisans will likely arrive at very different perceptions of the competence of a political leader. Furthermore, it is clear that these qualities apply to political leaders, and not to the basic institutions and values of a political system that were at the heart of the original concept of political trust.
Norris tackles this research question with an impressive analysis of the data from the World Values Survey (WVS), and in this respect the book is also a tribute to the WVS’s founder, Ronald Inglehart. A first, and important, conclusion advanced by the book is that there is no general downward trend with regard to political and social trust, as has been often claimed. While there are obvious fluctuations in levels of political trust today, the author shows that we cannot observe clear trends over time. Norris uses a vast array of data to operationalize competence, impartiality, and integrity, concluding that there is no universal relationship between these features and levels of political trust. Here, the consideration that citizens also need access to reliable information about how competent their government really is plays a central role.
The V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, has compiled an authoritative index on levels of freedom of the press and freedom of information. In their data, Denmark and Germany are typical examples of societies with a free information flow, while typical examples of societies without this freedom are Russia and China. By taking into account the freedom of information in a society, the apparent puzzle of the absence of a strong correlation between trustworthiness and levels of trust can be solved. In free and open societies, we do observe a positive relationship between (objective) quality indicators, on the one hand, and levels of political trust, on the other. In those countries even more “critical citizens” will reward the political system with high levels of political trust when the institutions actually deliver. This means that in a vast range of countries, common assumptions are actually confirmed: citizens have sufficient and reliable information to judge how corrupt their government is, and they will base their level of trust on this information. In those countries, political trust is an important component of a virtuous cycle, where good governance leads to higher level of trust. However, it is important not just that information is freely available, but also that citizens need the knowledge and the interest to interpret this information. Citizens within liberal democracies, particularly those with a higher education, are remarkably successful in judging in a more or less objective manner how trustworthy their government is. This necessarily implies a high level of inequality in terms of citizens’ ability to not only access but interpret information on good governance in their country. However, this topic does not receive all that much attention in the book.
In authoritarian regimes a totally different picture emerges, as there are no significant connections between objective indicators for the quality of government and levels of political trust. In these regimes, citizens do not have access to independent information to judge whether the government is trustworthy or not. This is an important insight, as it implies that political trust acquires a totally different meaning in liberal versus authoritarian settings. One might quibble, however, about the concepts applied here. When citizens in authoritarian regimes still say they “trust” government, this is labeled as “credulous trust.” The adjective implies, according to the dictionary, that there is an “(over)readiness to believe on weak or insufficient grounds.” But the use of this modifier can easily be interpreted as a suggestion that citizens themselves are too eager to believe authorities. Yet, the V-Dem index actually measures the extent to which citizens have access to any reliable information. If the entire media system is controlled by the state, and if a culture of fear is imposed from above, it can hardly be called credulity when citizens just accept the available information about their government. A crucial insight of this volume, thus, is that a free media serves as a crucial link in the causal chain between quality of government and political trust. As the subtitle implies, with a subtle reference to Lenin, “trust but verify.” For those who can actually verify, this idea seems quite robust.
The statistical analyses in the book are clearly explained and convincing. For the figures, however, one would appreciate more information about the crucial variable of open access to information. In most of the figures, this variable is simply dichotomized, and I can tell from my own experience that this is a highly effective way to convey the argument to students. But in this way, a lot of information is lost. We get one group of open societies, ranging from Denmark to Bolivia, and a group of closed societies, ranging from Croatia to China. This raises the question, however, of whether the mechanism of “imperative trust” (if we want to avoid the concept of “credulous trust”) is equally strong in Croatia as in China.
This important work by Pippa Norris brings new insights to the debate on the relationship between quality of government, political trust, and freedom of information, opening new areas for future research and discussion in the discipline. Some readers will emphasize the finding about the objective foundation of trust in liberal democracies, while others will stress the argument in the context of authoritarian regimes. By framing the discussion in this manner, Norris has made an important contribution to academic and theoretical debates about political trust for years to come.
