The Decline of Trust in Government

Abstract

Observers’ surprise at the recent rise of populist parties in many European countries, the triumph of Brexit in the UK referendum of June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency in November 2016 has shown how poorly questions of generalised social trust are understood by most political commentators and social scientists. The best explanation for these epochal events is a sharp decline in public trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer records this decline in recent years. It is a worldwide poll, but its figures show European countries and the usa as being among the worst affected, with half or more of their populations believing the present system is not working. The Edelman figures suggest that public trust in government, business, the public media and ngos are all falling, trust in the Chief Executive Officers of large businesses especially sharply. The result is a rising sense of injustice and helplessness, a lack of hope and confidence in the present system, and a desire for radical change. All of these features help to explain the public’s loss of faith in established parties of government and opposition and its growing attachment to populist parties which offer faith in ordinary people and simple solutions to complex problems.1 In order to understand what is going on, then, it is crucial that we study generalised social trust systematically. I offered a framework for doing so in my Trust: a History (Oxford University Press, 2014), and I also suggested why social distrust is growing within modern Western societies. In this paper I take that account further, up to the critical votes and decisions of 2015–16. Trust is a universal human need. We all need to take decisions every day about how to behave in certain situations. Most of those decisions concern the future in some way. We are virtually never in a position to know and weigh rationally all the factors affecting any given decision; instead we have to trust certain constants in our life, and decide according to habit, feeling and personal taste. The trust involved here can always be traced back to general social trust. Individual trust is always placed within a framework of broader trust vectors within society. The guarantees of our trust are cultural and social entities: