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Book Reviews: Rethinking the Link between Trust and Democratic Government

In his groundbreaking contribution to the study of government performance, Robert Putnam (1994) suggested a link between trust (the source of social capital) and good government. Contrasting northern and southern Italy, Putnam pointed out that the former enjoyed a vibrant civic community composed of people engaging in cooperative relations based on trust, whereas the south was plagued by social fragmentation, isolation, and distrust. These differences lay behind the contrasting performance of the two regions: While the north had an effective democratic government, the south suffered from clientelism, corruption, and underdevelopment. This parsimonious argument soon became established wisdom. Scholars from many disciplines embraced social capital as an explanation for differences in economic development, institutional stability, political participation, and many other positive outcomes, whereas practitioners adopted an agenda of social capital building, assuming that by promoting inter-personal trust, they would be preparing the ground for social and economic development. Many experts in public administration reacted in the same way: Social capital was included in numerous studies of social policy, urban studies, administrative reform, and personnel policy.

The enthusiasm for social capital and trust as a silver bullet for creating effective democracy went beyond the real explanatory potential of the concept. Despite some attempts to elucidate the origins of social capital (see, e.g., Boix and Posner 1998), the most common explanation attributed current levels of trust to events in the very distant past. Consequently, it became difficult to understand how levels of trust could change and, more importantly, how social capital could be created. Furthermore, the link between trust and government performance was weak, at best. Competing accounts argued that social capital means citizens trust each other to hold government accountable; that social capital increases civic participation and, consequently, creates pressure to improve the quality of government; and that citizens who trust each other reduce transaction and monitoring costs and therefore free government resources (money, time, attention, and authority) for better purposes. Scholars have not identified which, if any, of these (and other) causal mechanisms is the right one. Finally, as Sidney Tarrow (1996) argued in his critique of Putnam's work, one can also make the argument (and find empirical evidence to support it) that social capital is actually a consequence rather than a cause of good government.

Notwithstanding these difficulties in elaborating plausible causal arguments, the underlying idea according to which interpersonal trust and democracy were inevitably linked (even if we did not know how) was accepted as common sense. Given the positive value attributed to both trust and good government, it seemed logical to assume that they were closely related. In Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism, Matthew Cleary and Susan Stokes challenge this idea and, more importantly, provide an alternative argument. Using a research strategy similar to Putnam's-systematic analysis of regional variation in the quality of democracy-these authors argue that, in fact, democratic government requires citizens' skepticism rather than trust in order to perform effectively. They analyze the experience of two developing countries, Mexico and Argentina, with considerable regional variation in terms of the quality of democracy and interpersonal trust, ranging from regions such as Mar del Plata (Argentina) and Baja California (Mexico), which have vibrant, competitive democracies, to Misiones (Argentina) and Puebla (Mexico), which are still plagued by clientelism and authoritarian practices. The authors suggest that this variation cannot be explained by differences in the level of social trust, as the social capital argument would hold, but, on the contrary, by the lack of a more sophisticated relationship between citizens and politicians, which-rather than being based on trust-is based on the institutionalization of skepticism. Thus, instead of trusting politicians and engaging in personal relations with them (usually in the form of clientelism), citizens in good-quality democracies distrust politicians and therefore create institutions that limit their power and promote accountability and responsiveness. They claim that "[a]s democracy in a country or region deepens, the nature of political trust is likely to change. Citizens will turn from the belief that what matters for producing responsive governments is that politicians be personally trustworthy, to the belief that what matters is that institutions constrain politicians to be trustworthy" (177).

To support this argument, Cleary and Stokes rely on three complementary strategies: theoretical discussion, case study research of four regions in each country, and statistical analysis of individual-level surveys carried out in both countries. In the first chapter, they submit the civic culture argument to a rigorous test of its logical coherence and theoretical soundness and find that, despite its attractiveness, it lacks solid foundations and, more importantly, ignores a very old tradition of normative political theory (dating back to Montesquieu, Hume, and Madison) that posits distrust as the cornerstone of republican government. [1]

The second part of the book presents two sets of case studies, one analyzing four states in Mexico and the second four provinces in Argentina. The purpose of this section is to identify variation in the quality of democracy in each region. Within each country, the study is flawless: There is a good combination of research techniques and a careful, systematic comparison of the four cases. However, comparing the chapters, readers will find that, despite their similar structure, they differ significantly not only in style (which is understandable given the area of specialization of each author) but also conceptually. In the Mexican cases, the quality of democracy seems to be defined as vigorous electoral competition, whereas the studies on the Argentine regions equate it with accountability and, in particular, fiscal behavior. Moreover, the analysis of the Mexican states is done at a highly aggregate level, emphasizing electoral rules and political processes rather than government performance. In contrast, the analysis of Argentina's regions includes very detailed analyses of fiscal and economic performance and an in-depth case study of policy making in Mar del Plata. Thus, even if each chapter stands on firm ground on its own, there is no communication among them (and that may be why the authors do not make an explicit comparison of these chapters).

Once they rank the four regions of each country according to the quality of their democracies, Cleary and Stokes test their hypothesis regarding political culture and democracy with a statistical analysis based on two surveys carried out specifically for this book. In this section, they put forward a key distinction between trust in politicians and trust in institutions. The first is usually found in less democratic regions, where people interact directly with their representatives and social capital serves as the basis for clientelistic networks and informal partisan structures. In contrast, more democratized regions show lower levels of interpersonal trust and citizens have lower expectations regarding politicians' trustworthiness. This skepticism is the reason citizens demand institutions that curb the capacity of politicians to engage in clientelistic politics. In other words, in more democratic regions, people do not expect politicians to respond to their demands and preferences because of personal virtues but because they are limited by institutional constraints.

The last question addressed in the book is how a region can move from low-quality democracy (and high levels of interpersonal trust) to a more institutionalized democratic system. Cleary and Stokes's answer is economic change. As a poor and unequal region undergoes economic development, the middle class will become less interested in receiving personal favors from their representatives and instead will demand better government performance. In response, politicians will shift their strategies from clientelism to the creation of accountability mechanisms, which, in this new scenario, is a more effective means of gaining popular support.

The argument of the book is not entirely against trust but rather, as the authors explain, against the emphasis on interpersonal trust: "Democratic political culture may be a culture of citizenship, awareness, and participation. But it is also a culture of skepticism, of contingent consent, and of conditional, weak trust in government" (185). To put it simply, in solid democracies, people do not trust politicians, but they do trust the institutions that serve as mechanisms to hold them accountable. The unanswered question, however, is how institutions become trustworthy, and it is here that public administration scholarship comes into play. Trust in institutions is a product not only of institutional design but also of institutional performance, and therefore it is essential to understand how administrative structures, leadership, interagency coordination, and organizational incentives may have a positive impact on government performance and, consequently, on the quality of democracy. A research agenda along these lines would enrich the interdisciplinary dialogue between political science and public administration while improving our understanding of both the effects of democratization on the public sector and the impact of public administration on the quality of democracy (in both developed and developing countries). In any case, Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism is a valuable contribution to this dialogue, leaving readers with a more skeptical view of politicians but confidence in the capacity of institutions to improve government performance.

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[1]Surprisingly, however, Michael Oakeshott is not mentioned in this discussion. His classic work The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996) would have provided an excellent philosophical background for these competing arguments regarding social trust and government.

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