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Political elites and the democratic duty to trust the people

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Abstract

Political trust is usually construed in the terms of political elites’ duty to be trustworthy. This paper makes a modest yet radical claim, contending that in a democratic polity, political elites have also a symmetric prima facie duty to trust citizens to be competent and willing social actors. The paper offers a general framework for rethinking political trust as a bi-directional, rather than uni-directional, social relation. “Trust as an attitude” section begins by distinguishing trust-as-belief from trust-as-attitude, and contends that only with reference to the latter the idea of a duty to trust becomes plausible. “A comprehensive theory of political trust” section outlines my comprehensive theory of political trust. “Political trust as delegative and as coordinative” section distinguishes two basic dimensions of political trust: delegative and coordinative. “Political elites’ duty to trust” section introduces the notion of a political duty to trust, and contends that political elites have a prima facie duty to trust based on the specific features of coordinative trust. “Who belongs to political elites?” section specifies who is bound by this prima facie duty and “Democracy and the circle of trust” section reflects on how circles of trust can be initiated.

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Notes

  1. For recent examples, see Brennan (2016), Somin (2016), Caplan (2007).

  2. An obvious exception is, of course, the pragmatist tradition, particularly John Dewey. See Frega 2019 for an overview. The idea of democratic governance adopted in this paper too is indebted to this tradition, as seen for example in the works of Harold Lasswell (1951), Christopher Ansell (2011), or Charles Sabel (2012).

  3. Landemore’s and others take on democratic reason is that democracy can rely on the voluntary contribution of everybody’s intelligence in solving social problems, rather than delegating their solution to few selected experts.

  4. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of this journal for suggesting me to make this distinction explicit.

  5. See for example Barber (2003), Fung (2009), Carpini et al. (2004).

  6. See Smiley (1989), Clarke (2002), Thaler and Sunstein (2003).

  7. Also the authors who emphasize the salutary role of citizens’ mistrust in elites as a countervailing power necessary to keep political elites in check admit that political distrust can play its healthy democratic role only against the background of a basic political trust in democratic institutions (Rosanvallon 2008; Warren 2018; Keane 2009).

  8. A similar typology of political trust relationships is adumbrated in Offe (1999).

  9. See Honneth (2014) for an insightful recombination of these two traditions. Niklas Luhmann is another key figure in this tradition.

  10. For a comparative overview of policymaking measures to tame Covid-19 that highlight the role of trust, see (Weible et al. 2020).

  11. See Baier (1986), Thomas (1978); Pettit (1995); and Faulkner (2007).

  12. See Seyd (2015), Aström (2020), Jong Lee and Yu (2013), Yang (2005), Ivacko et al. (2013), Van de Walle and Lahat (2017), Moyson et al. (2016), Vigoda-Gadot et al. (2012).

  13. See Lipsky (1980) for the general argument, and Gilson (2003), Peel (1998), and Pautz and Wamsley (2012) for exemplifications in different policy fields.

  14. See Åström and Karlsson (2020), Moyson et al. (2016) and Jong Lee and Jeong Yu (2013) for empirical evidence.

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  1. Centre d’Etude des Mouvements Sociaux, EHESS-CNRS-INSERM, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006, Paris, France

    Roberto Frega

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The original online version of this article was revised due to incorrect reference citations “XXX 2019” and “XXX 2020”. Now, they have been corrected to “Frega 2019” and “Frega 2020”.

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Frega, R. Political elites and the democratic duty to trust the people. Acta Polit (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00323-5

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