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Trust is political

It is a sign of the times that an increasing proportion of papers submitted to, and published in, Journal of Trust Research (JTR) address the broad area of political trust. These studies mostly consider how members of the public do or don’t trust in various societal institutions. At the same time they work on the premise that such trust matters in the sense that, notably, an erosion of trust could severely impede cohesion and collaboration at large (see, for example, Festenstein, 2020; Hetherington, 2005). This makes trust and trusting political. Trust as an attitude with behavioural consequences connects, enables and comforts – or, when it is lacking or even turning into distrust, it separates, prevents and worries – in social relations. Thus, from the interpersonal to the institutional level, we might see trust as a vote on whom people are prepared to cooperate with (e.g. Hamm et al., 2016). The politics of trust revolve around securing allegiance and maintaining alliances of people with common interests. And trust implies a special form of reliance on others whom we can control and understand only partly at best. Especially in times of grand challenges, transformations and disruptions, ‘Who trusts whom?’ is just as much a political as a personal question. Any answer given reflects and affects ongoing social dynamics. The articles contained in this new JTR issue all speak to some extent to this political interpretation of trust and trusting. As usual, they were not curated based on this theme, but were simply next in the publication pipeline. Still, as I will attempt below, they can be connected as they all show us the political implications of trusting in current societies. First, Adam Seligman’s (2021) article on ‘Trust, experience and embodied knowledge or lessons from John Dewey on the dangers of abstraction’ essentially (re-)conceptualises trust as distinct from confidence. In short – and in my personal interpretation – to Seligman trusting means to suspend judgement and, in particular, to be able to deal with ambiguity, relying on experience rather than abstract knowledge. What makes his conceptual exploration ‘political’ is that he frames it in the context of (the troubles of) civil society. In particular, Seligman points out that trust matters where people lack the knowledge and ability to rely on abstractions of others – which would be a matter of confidence. This means that trust is essentially relevant in relation to strangers. The strangeness we all represent to each other could prevent us from starting cooperative interactions or relationships and from gaining the experiences that enable us to further extend trust. If we lose the ability to trust in this sense, ‘there can be no civil society to speak of’ (Seligman, 2021, p. 19). We might imagine it this way: Populists tell us to rely only on the people and things we (already) know. Hence they ask us to use confidence. Trust as experience, in contrast, lets us be open to what we do not know (yet). It enables an open society that can handle diversity and ambiguity. Refusing trust thus becomes a political move of denying strangers the benefit of the doubt, which effectively means exclusion, or worse. The damage to trust that populism might do politically is a strong theme in the second article contained in this JTR issue, too, Matt Bergbower and Levi Allen’s (2021) ‘Trust in the American political parties and support for public policy: Why Republicans benefit from political distrust’. Their core contribution is to analyse how support for public policy is affected by whether people believe the political parties to govern ethically and honestly when in power. They find, in short, that those who trust the Republican party are more reluctant to