Trust Never Sleeps

In most analyses of democracy, high level of trust towards politicians and the political system is considered to correlate with well-functioning democracy. Declining levels of trust, participation and voter turnout are seen as threats to democratic political system as they allegedly signal a dissatisfaction and mistrust of politics and ultimately lead to legitimacy crisis. In a more general sense, trust is seen as all-encompassingly beneficial to the society as a whole: many theorists of social capital have elevated trust as the chief virtue of communal success. Yet powerful counter-currents in the history of political theory point to a somewhat opposite conclusion. Democratic political systems are based on mistrust of power. This counter-history could be traced back to the very beginnings of democracy, as mistrust of power was the animating force behind the first Cleisthenian democratic reforms of ancient Athens. Democratic systems include all sorts of checks and balances to counterweight power and curtail the influence of power-hungry elites. Written constitutions and the principle of parliamentarism developed precisely for the reason that power could not be trusted. The paper scrutinizes the importance of mistrust for (democratic) politics. While a certain level of trust is mandatory in the field of economy for it to function, the assumption guiding politics has more or less always been that it is a dog-eat-dog world where trust is a sign of stupidity, not a virtue. The analysis of Machiavelli spells this out rather convincingly: the successful politician needs to minimize his dependence from others.