Dysfunctional state institutions,trust, and governance in areas of limited statehood

Areas of limited statehood where the state is absent or dysfunctional are rarely ungoverned or ungovernable spaces. The provision of rules and regulations, as well as of public goods and services – governance – does not necessarily depend on the existence of functioning state institutions. How can this be explained? To begin with, we identify functional equivalents to state institutions that fail to govern hierarchically. Moreover, we focus on informal institutions based on trust that are endogenous to areas of limited statehood. Personalized trust among community members enables actors to overcome collective action problems and enhances the legitimacy of governance actors. The main challenge in areas of limited statehood, which are often characterized by social heterogeneity and deep social and cultural cleavages (particularly in post‐conflict societies) is to move to generalized trust beyond the local level and to “imagined communities among strangers,” despite dysfunctional state institutions. We propose two mechanisms: First, the more group‐based identities are constructed in inclusive ways and the more group identities are cross‐cutting and overlapping, the more they lead to and maintain generalized trust. Second, experiences with fair and impartial institutions and governance practices – irrespective of whether state or non‐state – also lead to generalized trust beyond the local level and allow for the upscaling of governance.     

Security Sector Reform,Statebuilding and Local Ownership: Securing the State or its People?

It is widely acknowledged that while local ownership is one of the core principles of successful Security Sector Reform (SSR) programmes, the concept is narrowly interpreted in terms of who owns what. Moreover, the focus of SSR is often on building state institutions, rather than building the relationship between people and the state, which further limits the extent to which people, particularly at the community level, are engaged in SSR processes. It is argued that without ensuring meaningful and inclusive local ownership of SSR programmes, public trust and confidence in state security and justice sector institutions will be limited. Crucially, this will leave the state vulnerable to renewed outbreaks of conflict. To rectify this it is proposed that a hybrid SSR approach be promoted by incorporating community safety structures into SSR programmes.     

Trust Your Compatriots, but Count Your Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy

Although trust is clearly central to human relations of all kinds, it is less clear whether there is a role for trust in democratic politics. In this article, I argue that trust is central to democratic institutions as well as to democratic political participation, and that arguments which make distrust the central element of democracy fail. First, I argue for the centrality of trust to the democratic process. The voluntary compliance that is central to democracies relies on trust, along two dimensions: citizens must trust their legislators to have the national interest in mind and citizens must trust each other to abide by democratically established laws. Second, I refute arguments that place distrust at the centre of democratic institutions. I argue, instead, that citizens must be vigilant with respect to their legislators and fellow citizens; that is, they must be willing to ensure that the institutions are working fairly and that people continue to abide by shared regulations. This vigilance – which is reflected both in a set of institutions as well as an active citizenry – is motivated by an attitude termed 'mistrust'. Mistrust is a cautious attitude that propels citizens to maintain a watchful eye on the political and social happenings within their communities. Moreover, mistrust depends on trust: we trust fellow citizens to monitor for abuses of our own rights and privileges just as we monitor for abuses of their rights and privileges. Finally, I argue that distrust is inimical to democracy. We are, consequently, right to worry about widespread reports of trust's decline. Just as distrust is harmful to human relations of all kinds, and just as trust is central to positive human relations of all kinds, so is distrust inimical to democracy and trust central to its flourishing.     

Three Forms of Interpersonal Trust: Evidence from Swedish Municipalities

Social trust is usually treated as a dichotomy between particularized and generalized trust. In this article it is argued that a third distinct form, community trust, is neither particularized nor generalized and bounded in space rather than persons. Factor analysis of survey data from 33 Swedish municipalities (N = 6,453) distinguishes between particularized, generalized and community trust. Furthermore, regression analyses show that the three trust forms have partly distinct antecedents and linked to different types of behaviours. While generalized trust best predicts leaps of faith in relation to strangers, community trust is the only trust form significantly predicting taking part in local problem solving. Finally, multilevel analysis shows that community trust is the trust form most vulnerable to changes with respect to ethnic diversity and socioeconomic equality.     

Safeguarding the Future of Democracy

Abstract

The tenets of democracy appear to be facing a crisis in modern western societies, as trust in public figures and institutions—including politicians and government—declines and distrust of them increases. This decline is particularly visible in the cynical attitudes and non-voting behaviour of British young people. This paper presents a more contemporary conceptualisation of trust and distrust, from which four segments of young voters and non-voters emerge. A mix of calculative, predictive and identification trust-building strategies are applied to these four segments to reinforce their trust and reduce their distrust, thereby reconnecting them with parliamentary politics. This paper concludes with an agenda for further research.     

Civil society institutions or semi-public agencies? State regulation of parties and voluntary organizations in Norway

The relationship between the Norwegian State on the one hand, and political parties and voluntary organizations on the other, has traditionally been based on mutual trust. To assess the claim that civil society institutions are developing towards ‘semi-public agencies’, we review state regulation of Norwegian voluntary organizations and political parties. The State does demand more accountability and transparency in return for public funding, but many aspects are also regulated scarcely or not at all. This indicates that substantial mutual trust remains. This relationship might be characterized as a partnership based on interdependence, rather than colonization.     

党的领导与中国式善治

我国的国家治理现代化本质是实现中国式善治,根本在于实现人民的主体性,充分保障人民当家作主,充分发挥人民的主动性、积极性、创造性。先锋政党、有为政府、共益市场、有机社会这四个要素,共同保障人民主体性的实现。先锋性政党的领导,是中国善治的关键与根本优势,使得我国善治体系是有为政府而非有限政府,是人民为中心的市场经济而不是资本为中心的市场经济,是有机社会而非市民社会。     

The ‘problem’ with youth: young people,citizenship and the community

Fears that we are experiencing a crisis in citizenship have been increasingly directed towards youth. Popular political and government rhetoric has frequently positioned young people as a threat to the healthy functioning of citizenship and democracy. Policies have been implemented to educate them and control their behaviour, particularly in their local communities, in an attempt to foster them as citizens deemed appropriate to join adult society. This article provides evidence to the contrary, of young people who wish to be part of their local communities and incorporated in the development of relationships of mutual trust and respect. In this context it is argued that the New Labour government's approach to renewing citizenship for the modern age is contributing to the alienation of young people from any sense of inclusive citizenship. It is put forward that if we are truly concerned with the engagement and empowerment of young people, what is needed is a broader definition of citizenship that enables them to participate as young citizens and respects their voices as an important part of a fair society. This, it is argued, would entail a departure from currently dominant conceptions of citizenship towards, instead, a cultural citizenship approach.     

Different goods, different effects: exploring the effects of generalized social trust in large-N collective action

Does generalized social trust help solve large-N collective action problems? This paper argues so, offering a novel explanation for the relationship: People tend to cooperate if they expect others to be cooperating, which implies that people holding generalized social trust more readily cooperate in large-N dilemmas because they expect that most people will cooperate. The paper tests the explanation in a rigorous design. The analyses show a positive, robust effect of generalized social trust on public good provision, but no effect is found in a joint product situation. This supports the hypothesis, indicating that trust specifically enhances cooperation in collective action dilemmas.     

Political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?

How can we explain the rise in diffuse political support during the Covid-19 pandemic? Recent research has argued that the lockdown measures generated political support. In contrast, I argue that the intensity of the pandemic rallied people around political institutions. Collective angst in the face of exponentially rising Covid-19 cases depresses the usual cognitive evaluations of institutions and leads citizens to rally around existing intuitions as a lifebuoy. Using a representative Dutch household survey conducted over March 2020, I compare the lockdown effect to the dynamic of the pandemic. I find that the lockdown effect is driven by pre-existing time trends. Accounting for non-linearities in time makes the lockdown effect disappear. In contrast, more flexible modelling techniques reveal a robust effect of Covid-19 infections on political trust. In line with an anxiety effect, I find that standard determinants of political trust – such as economic evaluations and social trust – lose explanatory power as the pandemic spreads. This speaks to an emotionally driven rally effect that pushes cognitive evaluations to the background.     

Trust,institutions, and indigenous self‐governance: An exploratory study

Trust is important to the institutions that make societies successful. Globally, Indigenous peoples are actively building institutions for self‐governance, but there remains little empirical work on trust in this context. To address this gap, we use a mixed methods approach to explore three levels of trust among individual members from three related, but politically distinct First Nations (Indigenous peoples) in British Columbia, Canada. British Columbia offers a unique and dynamic context to explore trust and its relationship with the diverse institutional choices among First Nations. Survey results show that trust is low among respondents and individual variables predictive of trust in mainstream contexts, like education and employment, are not determinative. However, interpersonal trust and political trust were highest in the First Nation most active in institution building, and who linked this with a cultural revitalization narrative. Interviews suggested a bidirectional relationship between individual and collective drivers of trust in this context.     

The Political Economy of State Failure: A Social Contract Approach

By employing the contract approach of state theory, this article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of state failure phenomena which puts the emphasis on structural conditions as the root cause of state fragility and state failure. The article argues that the deep social fragility of some post-colonial societies, augmented by self-serving external interventions by foreign powers, is at the heart of their failure. Deep social fragility makes societies unable to cooperate and thus renders them powerless to discipline their leaders. Meanwhile, by linking leadership survival to the decisions and policies of a self-serving foreign power, intervention provides flawed incentives to the state leaders, which increases their predatory behaviour. In such situations, state leaders, rather than strengthening formal state institutions, again intensify the collective action problem and increase social fragility as mechanisms for survival.     

Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe

Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis-)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens’ evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: (1) income inequality and (2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of European Union (EU) trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro-level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro-level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010–2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens’ evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens’ support for Europe's multi-level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi-level governance system.     

Just sick of it? Health and political trust in Western Europe

This article explores two theoretical possibilities for why personal health may affect political trust: the psychological‐democratic contract theory, and the role of personal experience in opinion formation. It argues that citizens with health impairments are more likely to experience the direct effects of political decisions as they are more dependent on public health services. Negative subjective evaluations of public services can lower trust levels, especially if people's expectations are high. Using European Social Survey data, the association between health and trust in 19 Western European states is analysed. The results indicate that people in poor health exhibit lower levels of trust towards the political system than people in good health. The differences in trust between those in good and poor health are accentuated among citizens with left‐leaning ideological values. The results suggest that welfare issues may constitute a rare context in which personal, rather than collective, experiences affect opinion formation.     

When state‐level institutions cannot tell the whole story: An inquiry into municipal variations in quality of government

The lion's share of comparative research on corruption, good governance, and quality of government (QoG) has been cross‐country. However, a growing body of literature has begun to explore within‐country variations observed at the subnational level regarding corruption and social trust. The existence of such variations implies that state‐level institutions are not capable of telling the entire story and that quality of subnational‐level institutions might be important determinants of within‐country variations regarding, for instance, trust. This article delves into the Swedish case, an egalitarian country that scores high in international indices on lack of corruption and social trust; hence, a “least likely case” of subnational variations in both QoG and trust. Using two unique data sets, we find variations in both municipal QoG and social trust. In line with theory, we find that “local QoG” is associated with individual levels of community trust. This finding—in a low‐corrupt, high‐trust egalitarian society—strengthens the universality of the QoG‐perspective.     

How political malpractice affects trust in EU institutions

Abstract

Political misconduct is known to harm the politicians involved. Yet, we know less about how such events affect trust in political institutions. We study a real-world political malpractice affair in the European Commission, using a three-wave panel design to investigate how information about the affair influences trust in EU institutions. This enables us, first, to isolate the impact of new information on political trust, remedying endogeneity issues common in political trust research. Second, we assess which institutions are affected most (specificity) and whether effects depend upon citizens’ sophistication levels (conditionality). Finally, we assess the durability of effects over time. Our findings demonstrate that citizens obtain knowledge about EU affairs through the media, and use this knowledge in their trust evaluations. In doing so, citizens differentiate between EU and national institutions, with trust in the European Commission affected most. This suggests a sophisticated process and highlights the evaluative nature of political trust.     

Transparency in multilateral climate politics: Furthering (or distracting from) accountability?

This article analyzes the interplay between transparency and accountability in multilateral climate politics. The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for a “pledge‐and‐review” approach to collective climate action with an “enhanced transparency framework” as a key pillar of the Agreement. By making visible who is doing what, transparency is widely assumed to be vital to holding countries to account and building trust. We explore whether transparency is generating such effects in this context, by developing and applying an analytical framework to examine the link between transparency and accountability. We find that the scope and practices of climate transparency reflect (rather than necessarily reduce) broader conflicts over who should be held to account to whom and about what, with regard to responsibility and burden sharing for ambitious climate action. We conclude that the relationship between transparency and accountability is less straightforward than assumed, and that the transformative promise of transparency needs to be reconsidered in this light.     

The problem of stability and the ethos-based solution

Can unconditional basic income policies be designed to generate the motivational conditions that make possible their own support? Unconditional redistributive schemes do not take formal precautions to deal with potential motivational problems that may affect their stability. For example, they are designed to give people the freedom to decide whether or not to participate in the job market. However, scholars like Philippe Van Parijs and Simon Birnbaum think that the promotion of an ethos of justice can potentially do the necessary motivational work to secure the stability of unconditional redistributive institutions. Their solution lies in changing people’s behavior through an informal motivational mechanism rather than through a formal rule or institution. This paper argues against that ‘ethos-based solution.’ It presents three reasons to distrust that solution. First, it argues that even broader and more inclusive ethoi of justice can become oppressive and violate people’s freedom. Second, it suggests that the formal and informal strategies to generate that ethos may be difficult to implement, monitor, and control. Finally, it argues that the difficulties associated with implementing and developing that ethos of justice may lead us to either preserve an undesirable status quo or to implement suboptimal redistributive policies.     

Trustworthiness: the Commentators

Mark Thompson deplores the decline in the public trust of government and of public service institutions such as the BBC. But there has also been a decline in another form of trust: government's trust in the ability of professionals such as doctors and teachers to deliver high quality public services. And, unlike Thompson's type of trust, this decline was inevitable, because it was based on untenable assumptions concerning professional motivation. The author discusses the importance of trust in an unwritten constitution, including trust in the use made of public resources, trust that appointments are being made on merit, trust that the civil service is ‘speaking truth unto power’ behind the scenes and ultimately trust that it retains the ability to serve future governments. In a world where trust in institutions is diminishing, there are still surprising levels of trust in the world of private philanthropy. The public are only too ready to give donations without seeking to question, especially in the wake of major disasters. Yet the nature of aid agencies has changed dramatically in the past thirty years into major global enterprises with sophisticated media and marketing operations. In this case a greater degree of scepticism from those who donate and paradoxically less trust might actually result in better outcomes from aid and better use of funding. Trust is critical to the mission of the FCO. The public needs to trust the competence and sound judgment of the professional diplomats. The diplomats themselves need to be able to rely on the commonsense of their fellow colleagues. Ministers and diplomats need to trust each other. And other governments need to have confidence in the discretion of their British counterparts. This is an increasing challenge in the world of instant news. Trust can be quickly lost by indiscreet or self‐serving revelations. But the key is to be as open and transparent as possible about the processes of diplomacy. A new survey commissioned by the British Journalism Review demonstrates that public confidence in journalism has collapsed over the last five years. This is particularly true for the commercial broadcasters ITV and Channel 4, whose journalism has traditionally commanded as much public esteem as the BBC. Trust in the BBC and print journalists has also declined, and journalism suffered more than any of the other 16 occupational groups being assessed. This is partly due to the cumulative effect of various “fakery” scandals that have afflicted broadcasters over the last 18 months and partly down to a more widespread cynicism directed at those in authority.