Trust in Regulatory Intermediaries: The Relative Importance of Cues, Attitudes, Direct Experience and Influence

Regulatory regimes are complex networks of actors and functions. Trust between these actors is necessary for both the public mission of the regime and the private goals of the actors. We ask, how do regime actors decide on the trustworthiness of regulatory intermediaries, a less well-known and less central actor in regulatory regimes, and which mediate between the regulators and the regulatees? We focus our empirical observation on, more precisely, certification and accreditation actors. Our empirical analysis cover three different policy regimes data protection, finance and food safety sectors) in six countries with different politico-administrative features. Two broad trust theories guide analysis. In the first, that we call evaluative trust, trust decisions are based on cognitive evaluation, rational, evidence based and involve risk-analysis. The second is that of trust transference where trust decisions are made on the basis of the broader trust attitudes of the trustor and cues from other trust relations in the regime. Our analysis reveals that trustworthiness of the national regulatory agency, as well as actors’ trust others in general, have crucial effect on trust in regulatory intermediaries The findings confirm the central role of the trust transference heuristics, which is a main basis for regime actors to assess their trust in regulatory intermediaries. Direct experience does impact trust assessment too, but only for the regulatees themselves and their business interest groups. In fact, for this group of actors, direct experience measured by the frequency of contacts with regulatory intermediaries is the sole and dominant factor for trust assessment (besides general propensity to trust). Strikingly this group does not use trustworthiness of the national regulatory agency as a cue or broader attitudes like trust in non-governmental information sources and attitude towards strict government regulation. This points to an important finding: if present, direct experience through interactions reduce the need to rely upon cues as trust transference, or broad attitudes over the role of the state or non-state actors. The findings open a research agenda on the study of trust relations within regulatory regimes and on the conditions in which different mechanism of trust building are in play in regulation.