Shared Public Culture: A Reliable Source of Trust
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Shared Public Culture: A Reliable Source of Trust Patti Tamara Lenard Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University, 59 Shepard Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
Trust is a central element of any well-functioning democracy, and the fact that it is widely reported to be on the wane is a worrisome phenomenon of contemporary politics. It is therefore critical that political and social philosophers focus on efforts by which to rebuild trust relations. I argue that a shared public culture is up to the task of trust-building, for three reasons. First, a shared public culture gives citizens an insight into the motivations that inspire fellow citizens to action. Second, a shared public culture serves to generate both positive and negative sanctions, an understanding of which helps citizens to predict how their fellow citizens will behave. Third, a shared public culture generates a sense that we belong together. There are, of course, many communities that can reasonably be interpreted as having a shared public culture, even though they are characterized by low levels of trust. This observation leads me to suggest two features that a shared public culture must have in order to facilitate the emergence of trust relations: citizens must be willing to cooperate and they must be willing to submit to common institutions that will be responsible for coordinating this large-scale cooperation. If these conditions are fulfilled, a shared public culture will serve as a reliable source of trust relations. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 385–404. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300306 Keywords: trust; public culture; democracy; cooperation; David Miller; Arash Abizadeh
Introduction Trust is a central component of democratic political life (Warren, 1999). Recent reports about the lack of trust in politicians, in the political process, in political analysts, in fellow citizens are, therefore, worrying. For example, The Financial Times (London) asks, in a recent headline, ‘Is the public able to trust the officials?’ and The Herald (Glasgow) writes ‘It’s a sad day for democracy when you can’t trust the PM’ (Briscoe, 2005, 14; Macwhirter, 2005, 16). The apparent causes of this widespread decline are various: the increase in ethnocultural diversity, a culture of secrecy and corruption among political elites, increases in inequality gaps, and so on (Warren, 1999; Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000; Uslaner, 2002). The perils of this lack of trust are severe: the failure of
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our democracies, the incapacitation of the political decision-making process, and the gradual withdrawal of citizens’ willingness to participate in politics are all possible consequences of the gradual decline in trust (Nye, 1997a). If these warnings are right, and I believe that they are, we are in urgent need of strategies by which to regenerate trust relations among citizens. There is, however, a prior step on which this paper is focussed, namely, the task of identifying a reliabl
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