Trust

The actions of political leaders and perceptions of government performance are most often identified as potential precursors to trust. Economic stewardship is typically identified as a leading cause of trust, when citizens are dissatisfied with economic performance distrust of government ensues, but when prosperity abounds so will trust. The actions of incumbent leaders and evaluations of government institutions are also thought to be critical to levels of trust. The media focus on those scandals are seen as another contributor to national levels of trust. And most recently, Keele (2004b) demonstrated that government performance effects trust relative to evaluations of the political process since trust is reflection of government performance. However, trust is a reflection of civic activity and the attendant attitudes of social trust that are learned in civic life. So, then, we might be able to say that besides government performance, we also suspect that social capital is an important cause of trust in government.

Consequently, a macro-level research design is needed to allow, first, for the possibility that citizens, on average, trust successful governments and distrust failed ones. And second, a macro- level research design is needed to allow for the possibility that it is changes in social capital that moves trust over time.
Moreover, the ability to analyze the dynamics in a macro-level design provides us with additional leverage for assessing the relative effects of social capital and performance. While ignored in the past, both the social capital and performance explanations have distinct implications for the temporal dynamics of trust-that is how often we should expect trust to change in response to its causal influences and how long shocks to trust will persist. For example, if trust falls as social capital declines, then trust reflects durable feelings toward government and will change gradually as this orientation slowly shifts over time, and the effects of any changes in social capital should persist for a long time. In contrast, trust should react to performance rapidly, but any effect performance exerts on trust should not persist for long. As such, we should expect trust to have separate responses to performance and social capital. One that occurs in the short-term to performance and one that occurs more slowly in response to the long-term movements in social capital.

But an aggregate level study of trust in government, whatever its advantages, must have micro foundations. The first step in the analysis is to review the well-established micro foundations of trust before developing macro level point predictions. Testing the performance theory of trust requires aggregating over individual decisions and analyzing the macro-level dependency between trust and government performance, any micro level analysis will otherwise be contaminated with bias caused by hopeless amounts of endogeneity (Erikson 2004). For example, at a single time point, the cross sectional variation in assessments of the economy results from differing individual perceptions, while the real variation in assessments of economic performance occurs over time. Therefore, we cannot expect trust to have any meaningful cross sectional variation with government performance and micro-level evidence of performance affecting trust must be treated with caution.

social capital has two aspects, the first being the level of civic engagement in a community, state or nation, and the second being interpersonal trust, or the willingness to ascribe benign intentions to others. Citizens who participate in civic activities meet more people and learn interpersonal trust from interacting with them (Brehm and Rahn 1997; Putnam 1993, 1995a,b, 2000). Each dimension of social capital should contribute to levels of trust in government.
Being involved in civic activities, many of which involve engagement with government or groups that are attempting to influence government, connotes a belief that there is some chance of bringing about social change or control through the established political process. Citizens that are not engaged in civic activity are likely to feel a lack of political influence, which causes feelings of powerlessness, which in turn fuels cynicism and distrust toward political and social leaders, the institutions of government, and the regime as a whole (Miller 1974a,b). Therefore, citizens that have withdrawn from civic life harbour a hostile orientation toward government leaders and institutions. Moreover, civic engagement teaches interpersonal trust and individuals with low levels of interpersonal trust are equally mistrusting of people and institutions. Thus, the interpersonally distrusting citizen projects his or her misanthropic tendencies onto government. On the other hand, trust in government will influence civic activity, since it may require some level of trust in government to participate in activities that engage political institutions.

Other conceptions of trust could be used here instead. One other prominent conception of trust is that of Hardin who defines trust as a willingness to rely on another person or institution when one expects the actions of that other person or institution to take you into account in some relevant way (Hardin, 1998). Using this conception of trust, however, the implications for the performance theory of trust do not change. Here the citizen expects the representative to take considerations of prosperity and good order into account and if there is evidence that the representative has not taken the citizen's interests into account, i.e. performance is poor, trust will be lost. Others have defined trust as an evaluative orientation toward government (Stokes 1962; Hetherington 1998). Again, no contradiction arises since under all these definitions trust is an evaluative orientation based exclusively on political performance.

The dynamic between trust and social capital should, however, be quite different than the dynamic between trust and government performance. Here, instead of trust responding to the rapidly changing stream of information and perceptions that make up government performance, trust is reacting to a social process. Given that social capital is the combination of decisions to engage and the trusting attitudes that results from such engagement, the longitudinal movement in social capital should be gradual. As such, any effect that social capital has on trust should occur over the long term and not be contemporaneous as we expect for government performance. Moreover, the effects of social capital should persist far longer than those of government performance. A change in citizens' basic attitudes and engagement in civic life will not easily reverse itself and the effect on trust should, in turn, be longstanding. In short, we should expect the effects of government performance to be mostly contemporaneous and persist for far less time that those of social capital, while social capital and trust should vary around a common level and in the long run should covary substantially, with effects that persist far longer than those of government performance. Trust should respond to changes in performance immediately, making it, partially, a barometer of public satisfaction with government, but it should also respond more slowly over time to the deeper feelings of dissatisfaction with government that are tapped by social capital.

Conclusively , given that trust reflects not only how citizens view the recent performance of government, but also how people feel about the political process, trust becomes a comprehensive indicator of how citizen view the government. Trust captures not only economics and views of the major institutions of government, but also levels of warmth or hostility toward the political process itself. For any government then, trust serves as an important barometer of political performance and the responsiveness of politics to public demands. Finally, democratic governance is the interplay between the people in government and the institutions they inhabit. Political leaders may be unresponsive to public demands or political institutions may inhibit the execution of the public will. It is through trust that the public simultaneously evaluates everyday political occurrences and the ability of political institutions to achieve the public will. If trust reflected only one aspect of democratic governance, we would be left with an incomplete understanding of public satisfaction with government. The fact that, in the aggregate, the public evaluates both aspects of democracy indicates a public that realizes responsive government is realized not only through changing political leaders, but, at times, through a revision of politics itself.



References:

Keele, Luke. 2004a. \Not Just For Cointegration: Error Correction Models With Stationary Data." Working Paper.

Erikson, Robert S. 2004. \Macro vs. Micro Perspectives on Economic Voting: Is The MicroLevel Evidence Endogenously Induced?" Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology, Palo Alto.

Miller, Arthur H. 1974a. \Political Issues and Trust in Government: 1964-1970." American Political Science Review 68:951{972.

Putnam, Robert P. 2000. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.