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.

This project will inform and influence ongoing debates and enhance wider understanding of public trust in national and global governance, and the mechanisms through which regimes secure the support of citizens. Our research is relevant to a number of target audiences:

1. National and international policymakers: the research will provide crucial insights on patterns of trust and trustworthiness in political institutions across the world.

2. Civil society organisations and social movements engaged in campaigns to maintain or restore trust in agencies of national and global governance.

3. Business and other organisations concerned with national and global political risk and potential for democratic backsliding.

4. Media: the findings will be of interest to a range of journalists across the world through advancing understanding of trust in the media as well as the role of political communications in engendering percetions of trustworthiness.

5. The public: more broadly findings from the project will inform and engage citizens concerned with the health of liberal democracies.

We will draw on extensive experience and connections of the project team to develop relationships with policymakers, civil society and media - to ensure impacts are realised. We will use our links with organisations such as the UNDP, IFES, International IDEA, the IPU, the EU, Museum of Australian Democracy, Hansard Society, and Brookings Institution to organise briefing events. We will produce policy reports that present findings. We will commission a documentary based on the project, working with the documentary-maker to get this distributed through a public service broadcaster in the UK and/or North America along with the production of 2-3 minute online 'short shorts'. This will enable our research to reach a wider audience of citizens and other stakeholders.

We expect direct users to include: national and global agencies of governance (e.g. the UN), politicians and parties (both mainstream and outsiders), activists, civil servants, social movements, and private institutions (such as business) who have an interest in understanding sources of trust in political institutions, and specifically the strategies of regimes used to build support among citizens. We will reach these users via published working papers, presentations, policy reports, podcasts, blogs, interviews, and commentaries placed in national and international media.

We also expect indirect users to include citizens living in different regime types across the world, since the project aims to understand how consent is manufactured by the governed. We will make our findings easily accessible via our documentary and 'short shorts' distributed online. We will also use our connections with journalists (and our university press offices in the UK, US and Australia) to brief media such that our research dissemination has international reach.

In the longer-term, we expect to advance understanding of techniques that regimes use to generate support for agencies of national and global governance, and of the role of place in shaping public attitudes. We will generate new high-quality survey data which provides insight on trust in political institutions in hybrid and autocratic regimes in particular. We will generate new survey measures of trust and regime strategies and performances (such as through expert surveys), and demonstrate the effect of media exposure and messaging on political support.

While there is widespread concern about the crisis of democracy this ambitious project will provide novel theoretical insights on the sources of regime support, new empirical supply-side evidence on drivers of trust in agencies of national and global governance, and practical lessons for rebuilding trust in national and global governance.