Trust and Trustworthiness in National and Global Governance

There is widespread concern among scholars and popular commentators that citizens have grown more distrustful of politicians, sceptical about political institutions, and disillusioned with democratic processes and principles. Cynicism about government is thought to erode civic engagement and conventional forms of political participation, to reduce support for progressive public policies, and to provide the oxygen fuelling authoritarian-populist forces. The risks of democratic backsliding are regarded as particularly serious if public scepticism spreads upwards from core institutions of governance to corrode citizens' evaluations about the performance of liberal democracy and even its core ideals. Some fear a flagging civic culture may potentially contribute towards what many observers see as a liberal democratic retreat around the world. To date, most research has emphasised demand-side explanations of trust: what it is about citizens, like their education, class, attitudes, or cohort of birth, which makes them trusting. This project develops a theoretically novel, empirically ambitious and methodologically innovative approach to understanding how trust in agencies of national and global governance relates to trustworthiness, measured by performance indicators for governance agencies. We identify two primary dangers about any mismatch between trust and trustworthiness; where citizens are cynical about benevolent actors, which genuinely serve the public interest, and also where citizens naively trust malevolent actors, such as corrupt leaders. By contrast, the theory of critical citizens suggests that people should ideally trust but verify trustworthiness. The preponderance of evidence has compared political trust in the U.S., Europe and other established liberal democracies. By contrast, we will compare a far broader range of countries and types of regimes worldwide. The inclusion of authoritarian regimes, institutions and leaders, in particular, challenges many conventional theoretical and normative assumptions about trust and trustworthiness. We also will focus on analyzing trust across a range of national and global agencies of government (e.g. the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, and NATO, and regional multilateral organizations such as the EU, OAS, OSCE, and AU), which have received far less systematic attention in comparative research. How agencies might mobilize popular support is a highly practical and policy-relevant question, to which this study will contribute. To undertake our analysis, we will draw primarily upon large-scale longitudinal and cross-national survey data from the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS) and Eurobarometer, combined with national-level performance indices (including expert surveys) and individual-level perceptions of regime performance. We will commission additional national surveys from the WVS/EVS, prioritising fieldwork in authoritarian regimes - enabling us to develop global comparisons across a range of contexts. Building on the WVS/EVS will provide added value at relatively low cost. Our comparative analysis will combine aggregate- and individual-level analysis, and will use multi-level methods to understand individuals embedded within broader contexts. We will also use focus groups and survey and lab experiments. The project will additionally pilot new questions for measuring trust in political institutions.