Cooperation Without Trust?

8. State Institutions

151 Chapter 8 State Institutions S TATE INSTITUTIONS affect cooperation in two principal ways. First, government acts as a third party, providing security for and external enforcement of various interactions and exchanges among its constituents. If there is sufficient confidence in the government’s capacity to enforce the laws without extracting too high a rent in return, state institutions create a context in which cooperation becomes possible. Under some conditions, they may even facilitate the establishment of trustworthiness by allowing individuals to begin a relationship with small risks while they learn about each other. Second, government actors are in a relationship with those to whom they provide benefits and from whom they extract payments in money or service. To the extent that these government actors operate within rules and institutions that ensure transparency , integrity, and respectful behavior, they may be more successful in eliciting cooperation and compliance from citizens and subjects. Government’s third-party coercion is a major device for ensuring the reliability of interaction partners. Yet, despite significant experience with and scholarship on what makes for an effective state, state-building continues to confound policymakers and scholars (for a review of this literature, see Levi 2002). Organizations and institutions that promote cooperation without trust and support complex markets and governments are themselves the products of a long and contested historical process. Organizations and states, using third-party intervention, offer an alternative device for ensuring the reliability of a wide range of interaction partners. The problem, as history teaches us, is that organizations have a tendency toward oligarchy (Michels 1962), and states a tendency toward predatory behavior and banditry (Levi 1988; North 1981; Olson 1993). Such tendencies undermine the reliability of both the leadership and the institution itself. They may also undermine a state’s ability to generate the context for the emergence of trust relations among those it governs. Even stable democracies with well-designed institutions for constraining government officials face problems of assuring citizens that they are well served by those institutions and the policies they produce. Positive assessments of government reliability, or what some people might label government trustworthiness, are key to cooperative behaviors by constituents, both with each other and with government. However, different characteristics of the state are salient in these two settings. When government is a third party, at issue is its demonstrated competence and fairness in enforcement and monitoring. When government is a party to the relationship, evident respect for citizens and procedural justice are likely to be the key indicator of reliability. Competence matters, but the way government treats its clients and claimants seems to matter as much, if not more. In both circumstances, however, government’s power relative to that of the other actors is large. Its asymmetric power raises general issues about the reliability of its personnel in exercising self-restraint. Abuses of power in the form of exploitation, discrimination, or inordinate use of force are strong gauges of government unreliability, and they are likely to produce distrust of government and its agents. In exploring how cooperation is facilitated by state institutions, we must first reflect on the nature of the requisite state institutions. We then take up how such state institutions promote (or fail to promote) constituent cooperation with each other and with the state. Simultaneously, we discuss major alternative claims about the relationship between government and trust. In the next chapter, we apply these arguments and those developed earlier in the book to domains where the state is either ineffective or attempting to establish its authority. Credible Commitments, Competence, and Fairness There are parallels between the features we look for in assessing personal trustworthiness and what we consider to be the determinants of government reliability. Competence and context are important for both, and questions of motivation clearly color our judgments of public officials, especially , perhaps, during elections. Yet most talk of “trust of government” is an oxymoron: citizens operate without the quality and depth of information provided by interpersonal relationships (Hardin 1998b, 2002b). The problems faced by citizens in assessing the reliability of government and its officials are multiple. The complexity of the modern state and the controversy over appropriate performance measures create huge information problems. Citizens may not be paying much attention (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002), or they may make judgments (also tending to be information-poor) of individuals, such as presidents and prime ministers, rather than the government itself (Citrin 1974; Hetherington 1998; Levi 152 Cooperation Without...