Does it matter whom you trust? Studying the impact of trust and distrust in public and private actors within regulatory regimes on the performance of those regimes

The performance of regulatory regimes in terms of protecting citizens from risks while securing compliance from companies, is not only depending upon the actions of the sectoral regulatory agency. This paper elaborates the idea that it is the interplay of EU, political, administrative and regulatory actors, as well as their interactions with the regulatees and interest groups which together determines regime performance. A crucial condition for this interplay to function well, is that actors within the regime trust each other sufficiently. Building upon the duality of trust and distrust and the notions of dysfunctional trust and functional distrust, this assumption is nuanced, and the paper develops a second argument that regimes might perform the best when there are functional trust-distrust balances between different kinds of actors within the regulatory regime. This paper then uses data from the TiGRE survey on trustor perception of trust and distrust in different regime actors in data protection, food safety and financial sector, in order to assess such thresholds and functional balances of trust and distrust for well-functioning regimes through explanatory analyses, while controlling for individual, sector and country variables. The analyses also aim to understand whether trust/distrust in different actor types (political, administrative, regulatory actors and private actors) differ in terms of their power in explaining perceived regime performance. By comparing data protection with food safety and financial regulation, the paper will also shed light upon the specificities of trust and distrust in data protection in Europe, and will gauge whether such specificities also impact upon the regime performance in data protection.