Deliberation and trust.

• Author: Asen, Robert
• Position: Essay

By many accounts, trust is in short supply. In the United States, scholars have pointed to prominent national surveys to argue that trust in society has been declining for more than four decades (Hardin, 2006; Misztal, 1996; Putnam, 1995, 2000; Uslaner, 2000-2001; Wuthnow, 1999; Zmerli & Newton, 2008). When asked whether they could trust "the government in Washington," fewer people have answered affirmatively (American National Election Studies, 2010). Moreover, negative judgments have not been limited to distant institutions in the nation's capital. Expressing skepticism about their interactions with others, respondents increasingly have doubted that "people can be trusted," believing instead that "you can't be too careful in dealing with people" (Davis & Smith, 2009, p. 1811). Scholars studying trust worldwide have reported similar trends in Canada, much of Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere (Catterberg & Moreno, 2005; Mackie, 2001; Newton, 2001).

Scholars have offered various explanations for this apparent decline of trust (Norris, 2011). Some point to the performance of government, which in the United States has been implicated in scandals like Watergate and declarations of war but not victory on problems like poverty and terrorism (Behn, 2002). Others highlight news and entertainment media practices that depict a world of strangers who warrant suspicion, since they may swindle or even physically harm earnest citizens (Jamieson & Cappella, 1997). Still others identify generational changes, explaining that the celebrated "greatest generation" in the United States, which survived the Great Depression and defeated fascists in Europe and Asia, constituted a trusting generation, whereas successive generations have trusted strangers less and less (Putnam, 2000). Emphasizing economic developments, some scholars maintain that people who feel financially secure report higher levels of trust but that declining incomes and decreased job security in many Western nations undermine a sense of financial security (Patterson, 1999).

While some scholars interpret declining measures of trust as indicating a healthy skepticism among citizens, others warn of a weakened democracy populated by less engaged citizens (Inglehart, 1999). In his widely cited study of civic engagement, Robert Putnam (2000) offers a glimpse of what could be lost if people stop trusting each other--inclinations toward volunteering, contributing to charity, joining community organizations, serving on juries, giving blood, paying taxes, and more. These activities thrive when people regard each other as capable agents who have a stake in public affairs. Putnam (2000) concludes that "people who trust others are all-round good citizens" (p. 137). They cultivate democratic norms and practices that create opportunities for wider public engagement. Further, trusting citizens may direct their energies to institutions and to each other. Connecting these areas of trust, Danielle Allen (2004) explains that democracy needs institutions that "can act in the people's name and maintain the allegiance of the citizenry, but its citizens also need means of cultivating relationships among themselves that can nourish political trust" (p. 87). Yet if the importance of building trust is evident, the means for doing so remain elusive.

In this context, deliberation appears as a potentially valuable resource. Deliberation may facilitate engagement across differences in complex and diverse societies, where people need to justify to each other their publicly articulated values, interests, identities, and goals. In this spirit, Gerard Hauser and Chantal Benoit-Barne (2002) discern in deliberation the potential to build trust by offering interlocutors the "opportunity to acquire a sense of the range of difference and the mediating grounds of similarity that make it possible for us to form a civic community based on relations of collaboration" (p. 271). Hauser and Benoit-Barne caution that collaboration does not lead to consensus, but refers instead to working together even amidst disagreement. Along these lines, Matthew Festenstein (2005) suggests three ways that deliberation may build trust: enabling participants to present themselves in ways that may overcome negative stereotypes, strengthening good will and fidelity among representatives and constituents by foregrounding reason-giving, and fostering respect for diverse viewpoints by situating interlocutors as warranting address (p. 143). While these scholars identify deliberation as a potential source of trust, they stop short of explicating how this process might unfold.

To realize this resource, scholars need to develop theoretical models that consider how trust may function in deliberation. In developing these models, scholars cannot operate with a static concept of trust. This is a critical limit to the approaches of Robert Putnam and others, as Putnam (2007) acknowledges, since their reliance on survey data elides deliberation's transformative power (pp. 150, 158-159). The significance of this data, which helps to justify my efforts in this essay, arises from its capacity to illuminate important political and social trends. These trends may inform the wider contexts in which deliberation occurs, but they do not characterize processes of deliberation. Surveys inquiring about trust treat the concept as a discrete item that researchers may link to institutions, actors, and issues. In these surveys, trust exists as a quality prior to an expressed belief or action, such as support of a political figure or participation in a community organization. Alternatively, we may consider how deliberation may shift levels of trust. Although deliberation offers no guarantees, it may enable interlocutors to build levels of trust (Jacobs, Cook, & Delli Carpini, 2009; Mutz, 2006; cf. Sunstein, 2003).

To fully appreciate the relationship of deliberation and trust, scholars need a dynamic, process-based model. Rather than seeing one as the condition for the other, we need to recognize the mutually informative and constitutive relationship of deliberation and trust. Toward this end, I develop a model of deliberative trust as a relational practice. I argue that scholars may appreciate the role of trust in deliberation not by regarding trust as an attribute of one participant or another but as a quality that may emerge in the interactions of participants--the discursive relationships they mutually construct. As a practice, trust appears not as a precondition or an outcome of deliberation but as an activity that unfolds through deliberation. Conceptualizing trust in this way comports with scholarly models of deliberation by foregrounding process and participation. As a relational practice, trust is something that people do.

My argument in this essay develops over two main sections. In the first, I distinguish deliberative trust as a participatory activity from non-deliberative conceptions of trust. Practicing trust in deliberation draws on participants' experiences but does not require participants to possess shared experiences, values, and/or beliefs. As it exhibits a temporal orientation that may link disparate encounters, the practice of deliberative trust-which remains context-specific--is informed by elements of contingency, risk, and reciprocity. In the second section, I identify four qualities for practicing trust in deliberation: flexibility, forthrightness, engagement, and heedfulness. I explicate these qualities as mutually informative and relatively autonomous practices that constitute an analytic and normative framework. As such, these qualities suggest foci for investigating deliberation and trust as well as means for bolstering trust in deliberation.

TRUST AS A RELATIONAL PRACTICE

In developing a model of trust as a relational practice, I do not seek to account for all of the situations in which people may trust or be asked to trust others. Observing that scholars "elucidate quite different visions" of trust, Russell Hardin (2002) concludes that the term conveys multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings (p. 54). The polysemous quality of trust frustrates any efforts to collapse, synthesize, or create a hierarchy among its various meanings. However, scholars should not regard this situation as problematic because trust may productively convey different ideas and practices in different contexts. Conceiving of trust as an attitude or belief suits survey research, which may provide important information about respondents' perceptions of public issues at a particular moment. In other cases, we may usefully conceptualize trust as an economic calculation, as Claus Offe (1999) suggests when he likens trust to a "money-saving device" that enables people to forego the "transaction costs" associated with ensuring an outcome from another person (pp. 52-54). An economic frame may explain the trust that members of an organization place in a representative to advance their interests in a negotiation in which the members have no seats at the bargaining table. Trust between representatives and their constituents also may suggest moral obligations and perceptions of character, which could constitute bases for conceptualizing trust (Keranen, 2010; Uslaner, 2002).

What ties together many alternative conceptions of trust is that they frequently characterize an attitude, belief, or expectation about an activity in which the trusting person does not directly participate. Negotiators need trust because its absence would delegitimize any agreement they reached, creating a logistical nightmare for an organization and its membership. To the extent to which people express trust for policymakers in surveys about government performance, they do so because ordinary citizens do not make laws, so citizens can only hope that the laws made in their name will address pressing public issues appropriately--the alternative is increasing...