Trust in regulators: bringing the citizens’ perspective back in

Citizens are largely overlooked in research on trust and regulatory governance. Yet, they are key stakeholders of regulatory regimes. Existing scholarship focuses on trust relationships among core actors, such as regulators, regulates, legislators, intermediaries, and courts. Most approaches to studying regulatory processes usually theorize citizens as quite abstract group of claimed beneficiaries of regulatory actions. In rare cases when citizens are conceptualized as part of the regime their role is external and peripheral as those who simply trust rules, regulators, and regulatory regimes. However, trust is a relational property and it is impossible to seriously study it without looking at both sides of the relationship: the trustee and the trustor. Therefore, in this paper we claim that studying how citizens are trusted by key actors in regulatory governance – especially regulators, who stand at the center of regulatory regimes – is equally crucial to understand the functioning of regulatory regimes. For instance, the scope and strictness of rules is likely to be shaped by the extent to which citizens are trusted by policy makers; or the enforcement style is also likely to be affected by the level of regulatory agencies’ trust in citizens. We propose a conceptual framework how to bring citizens back into the heart of the study of regulatory governance. Using this work, we argue on a more general level that in public governance scholarship a shift is necessary in how trust is understood to trust to give citizens a proper place as empowered and equal actors in trust relationships. Our work intends to bring three contributions: (1) providing theoretical insight into the relation between citizens and regulators in the ‘regulatory triangle’ (regulators-regulatees-citizens); (2) bring citizens to the center of theorizing in regulatory governance studies, (3) introduce into the debate on regulation the concept of reciprocity of trusting process.