Political Trust, Commitment and Responsiveness
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Author | Matthew Festenstein |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719852569 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719852569
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(2) 446 –462
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719852569
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Political Trust, Commitment
and Responsiveness
Matthew Festenstein
Abstract
Political trust has become a central focus of political analysis and public lament. Political theorists
and philosophers typically think of interpersonal trust in politics as a fragile but valuable resource
for a flourishing or stable democratic polity. This article examines what conception of trust is
needed in order to play this role. It unpicks two candidate answers, a moral and a responsiveness
conception, the latter of which has been central to recent political theory in this area. It goes
on to outline a third, commitment conception and to set out how a focus on commitments and
their fulfilment provides a better account of trust for political purposes. Adopting this conception
discloses how trust relies on a contestable public normative space and has significant implications
for how we should approach three cognate topics, namely, judgements of trust, the place of
distrust and the relationship of interpersonal to institutional trust and distrust.
Keywords
trust, democratic theory, commitment, distrust
Accepted: 3 May 2019
The importance, fragility and dangers of trust and distrust have become increasingly cen-
tral topics for political analysis and normative reflection, as well as for anguished politi-
cal brooding. These themes dominate the extensive literature on how and ‘why we hate
politics’, on the wide-scale erosion of public trust and confidence in government, and on
the rise of anxieties about populism and its cultivated dialectic of distrust (of normal poli-
tics, parliaments, the system) and trust (of the leader, the movement) (e.g. Hay, 2007;
Hetherington and Rudolph, 2015; Levi and Stoker, 2000; Norris, 2011; Warren and Gastil,
2015). A particular dimension of this is a concern about the ethics and integrity of politi-
cians (Allen and Birch, 2015), although the targets of political trust and distrust are widely
dispersed, to include experts and professionals, the personalised leader, political parties,
government, the political classes, officials and bureaucrats and other citizens. Politicians
claim to seek to earn our trust, and where this seems to be at risk, to deflect concerns
Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
Corresponding author:
Matthew Festenstein, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 4AY, UK.
Email: matthew.festenstein@york.ac.uk
852569PSX0010.1177/0032321719852569Political StudiesFestenstein
research-article2019
Article
Festenstein 447
about trust on to other territory: in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair
insisted that divisions over this were not ‘over issues of trust or integrity … the real issue
… is not a matter not of trust but of judgment’ (cited Freeden, 2013: 192).
What do we mean by trust such that it matters to us in this way? One answer, which
has been predominant in the political theory literature on trust, is that we trust when we
think the interests of those whom we trust are aligned in the right way with ours or when
we think they are motivated to support our interests. The absence of this alignment in
politics, or at least our inability to rely on it, poses the problem of political trust. As Mark
Warren puts it in his influential analysis, ‘where there is politics […] the conditions of
trust are weak: the convergence of interests between truster and trusted cannot be taken
for granted’ (Warren, 1999: 312; cf. Hardin, 2006; Norris, 2011: 19–20; Warren, 2018:
76). I argue that this approach falls short of capturing what we are interested in when we
think about interpersonal trust in politics, and that instead we can make better sense of
political trust by seeing it as grounded in the attribution of commitments to those whom
we trust, together with reliance on them to fulfil these. Understanding trust through this
lens allows us to see the fragility of political trust in a different way: not primarily as the
product of epistemic uncertainty or conflict of interests but of the political contestability
that imbricates the commitments that underpin trust.
I develop this argument in four stages. The following section clarifies the scope and
starting point for the problem here: focusing on the kinds of value that political theorists
of trust have attributed to interpersonal trust, it asks, if interpersonal trust, as opposed to
mere reliance, has a value in politics, what concept of trust is in play? Section ‘Morality
and responsiveness’ examines and unpicks two candidate answers, a moral conception of
trust and what is called here a responsiveness conception, the latter of which has been
central to recent political theory in this area. I argue that these do not successfully draw
the line between trust and reliance and between trust and distrust. In their place, in section
‘Political trust and commitment’, I outline an alternative approach that analyses trust
through the notion of a practical commitment, and try to show how a focus on commit-
ments and their fulfilment provides a better account of trust for political purposes: if
political trust is to have the value ascribed to it, it needs to take the form of a commitment
conception.1 For a commitment account, to trust someone to do something involves
attributing a commitment to her to doing it and to rely upon her to meet that commitment.
Unlike the responsiveness account, this approach views my trusting as neutral about the
trusted’s motivations towards me. This attribution rests not only on explicitly undertaken
pledges but on the basis of the social and political roles and identities of those to whom
commitments are attributed. Judgements about trust and trustworthiness of politicians
and officials are not then primarily judgements about whether they are motivated to serve
your or my interests but about what commitments we take them to have and whether or
not we think they are being fulfilled. This has important repercussions for when we think
of trust or distrust as a legitimate attitude to take in politics, that is, when we are entitled
to trust. Section ‘Judgment, distrust, institutions’ develops the contrast between respon-
siveness and commitment views and brings out how adoption of the latter has significant
implications for how we should approach three cognate topics, namely, judgements of
trust, the place of distrust and the relationship of interpersonal to institutional trust and
distrust. Viewing political trust through the commitment lens does not only help us to
understand the claim that interpersonal political trust has value, but it also makes sense of
the way in which trust is public and contestable, and so political.
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