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Suspicious Minds: Towards a Typology of Political Distrust

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Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy

Part of the book series: Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century ((CDC))

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Abstract

This article analyses the concept of political distrust and theorizes the sources of different types of political distrust in a liberal democracy. Political distrust, or suspicion towards politics, has not been studied as much as political trust, although political theory has emphasized the importance of distrust in democracy since ancient times. The plentiful research on political trust shows that the importance of political trust varies depending on whether it is about an idea, a system, or an actor. However, distrust understood as the counterpart of trust in these studies has mostly been viewed in an unstructured way as a privatization of trust. Based on liberal political theory, we argue that the typologization of political distrust could bring new dimensions to understanding liberal democracy. An asymmetric approach to the political distrust concept enables the discovery of its potential sources and causal mechanisms, which can offer an improved explanation for the effects of political distrust on liberal democracy. We structure the theory as four ideal types of a politically suspicious citizen, which offers guidelines for the empirical study of distrust in democracies with the potential for new knowledge that can offer practical advice for strengthening both established and young democracies.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Paul-Erik Korvela

  2. Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

    Isak Vento

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  1. Paul-Erik Korvela
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  2. Isak Vento
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Correspondence to Paul-Erik Korvela .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Eerik Lagerspetz

  2. University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Oili Pulkkinen

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Korvela, PE., Vento, I. (2023). Suspicious Minds: Towards a Typology of Political Distrust. In: Lagerspetz, E., Pulkkinen, O. (eds) Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy. Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41397-1_3

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