Trustworthiness and Political Representation

A political order is democratic only to the extent that citizens can plausibly see themselves as jointly authoring the laws they must live under, rather than merely being well-governed by others. In representative systems, this ideal is necessarily mediated—citizens do not legislate directly—but it is not abandoned. The democratic question is whether representation can still connect citizens’ agency to binding collective decisions in a way that makes those decisions genuinely ours (Plotke 1997). Elections are an important mechanism of representatives’ accountability—yet they are insufficient by themselves as they do not remove citizens’ vulnerability to representatives’ discretionary power. Even after authorization, representatives inevitably exercise discretion in agenda-setting, bargaining, interpretation of pledges, and judgment under uncertainty; and in most democracies they also operate under a legally free mandate to deliberate and vote as they see fit, even when this diverges from what citizens expected (Manin 1997). This paper argues, first, that only justified trust can vindicate democratic representation as a mediated form of collective self-government. Trust, rather than mere consent, is what characterises citizens’ relation to their representatives (Leib and Ponet 2012; Beerbohm 2016). Justified trust is what makes trust democratically valuable, rather than the expression of citizens’ gullibility or representatives’ proclivity for manipulation. The normative task is therefore to explain what makes trust warranted in politics—what makes representatives genuinely trustworthy. Second, this paper builds upon Hawley’s conception of trustworthiness as commitment (2019), according to which trustworthiness consists in being competent and willing to meet one’s commitments, without requiring access to inner motives. I argue, however, that representative politics forces us to enrich this account in four ways. First, warranted political trust presupposes shared basic commitments (see also Bennett 2021): some disagreements are so deep that citizens cannot reasonably entrust power to someone who does not share core commitments with them. Second, because disagreement about the content and implications of commitments is endemic, a trustworthy representative must be willing to acknowledge disagreement and offer reasons for her interpretation of what her commitments require, rather than treating citizens’ contestation as normatively irrelevant. Third, that reason-giving must be double: it must draw both on the representative’s political commitments and partisan conception of the common good—shared with supporters—and on a view of democracy and citizens as free and equal, which representatives are supposed to share even with adversaries despite persistent disagreement. Finally, trustworthiness includes not only being disposed to justify but also signalling availability for justification by establishing practices that make reason-giving reliably accessible to all constituents. References (condensed) Beerbohm, Eric. “The Ethics of Electioneering.” JPP 2016 Bennett, Matthew. “Demoralizing Trust.”Ethics 2021 Hawley, Katherine. How to Be Trustworthy. OUP 2019 Leib, Ethan, and David Ponet. “Fiduciary Representation and Deliberative Engagement with Children.” JPP 2012 Manin, Bernard. The Principles of Representative Government. CUP 1997 Mansbridge, Jane. “A‘Selection Model’ of Political Representation.” JPP 2009 Plotke, David. “Representation Is Democracy.” Constellations 1997