Trust, Democracy, and Multicultural Challenges

Chapter 3: Distrust, Mistrust, and Democracy

3 distrust, mistrust, and democracy In the preceding chapter, I argued that trust is central to assuring the smooth functioning of the most basic of democratic institutions, and that trust is among the central public attitudes that must prevail in order for these institutions to maintain support over time. When there exists widespread trust among a population, legislators can act knowing that their decisions will elicit voluntary compliance, compliance offered because citizens trust legislators to make good decisions and because they trust their cocitizens to abide by these decisions. This is, clearly, an optimistic picture—some might even think it naïve—and often does not pertain within democratic communities. We have reason, after all, to believe that any democratic community will need to survive the ebb and flow of trust relations as citizens and their legislators react to changing political and social circumstances that can have positive and negative effects on trust relations. One reason to suspect that some amount of distrust or mistrust can be handled by democratic regimes is provided by recent empirical evidence announcing declining trust relations across democratic communities. Polls reveal a decreased sense of trust and confidence in legislators and the institutions they operate, an increased sense of alienation from the political system, and an increased cynicism about the motivation of those who choose to enter politics.1 Although some claim that distrust may be healthy—perhaps it is the case that “too much trust may be a bad thing for our liberties”—the belief that others can be trusted in general, or that the government can be trusted to do the right thing, is increasingly rare.2 The general worry is that without trust the voluntary compliance that secures an efficient and effective democracy will plummet.3 Absent trust, “citizens may begin to withdraw voluntary compliance with the system, including voluntary compliance with other laws, and distrust, mistrust, and democracy || 55 thus set in motion the downward spiral of worsening performance and more withdrawal from collective action of all kinds.”4 In the first section of the chapter, I analyze the concept and phenomenon of distrust, and the closely related concept and phenomenon of mistrust. In the past, many political theorists have suggested that distrust is central to democratic politics; I unpack this argument and then suggest that distrust is instead inimical to democracy. Democracy certainly does rely on vigilance : citizens must be watchful of their representatives. I suggest, however, that this vigilant attitude is itself motivated by mistrust rather than distrust, and I then argue that this vigilant, mistrustful attitude in fact depends on extensive trust relations among citizens and between citizens and their representatives . Whereas certain forms of distrust clearly damage trust relations , the mistrust that underpins vigilance supports rather than undermines strong democracy. Distrust and Mistrust: A Conceptual Analysis Chapter 1 began by exploring the concept and phenomenon of trust. I suggested that in order to understand the implication of social science research indicating a widespread decline in trust and confidence in others, we first needed a clear understanding of the meaning of trusting others. I offered a way to understand trust, as well as a guide to understanding the way in which social science and philosophical research has treated it. This chapter turns to concepts that are deployed to signal the absence of trust, namely, distrust and mistrust; as I shall suggest, they signal the absence of trust in quite distinctive ways, and their respective absences therefore have distinctive implications for political practice in democratic communities. The first observation to make is that an absence of trust does not automatically translate into distrustful or mistrustful attitudes; in this sense, neither of these concepts is, strictly speaking, the opposite of trust. There are plenty of people in whom we do not place our trust on a regular basis simply because we do not find ourselves in situations in which it is appropriate to extend trust, or otherwise, to them. In these kinds of cases, it would be odd to say that we distrust them, even though trust may be not be actively present; having neither met nor interacted with the citizens of Iceland, for example, I may not have a trusting attitude toward them (except, perhaps, insofar as I trust people in general), but this absence of trust is not equivalent to 56 || trust, democracy, and multicultural challenges distrusting them. Whatever it is that distrust and mistrust mean...