Electoral Debates in Television and Democratic Quality: Value Indicators (original) (raw)

Trust as a Basic Political Value

The European People‘s Party. Successes and Future Challenges. , 2010

In international surveys of various professions using the trust index,29 politicians and – since the start of the economic crisis – managers of international concerns, regularly land in the last two places. These results should be a warning signal for politics. Democracies, parties and states can only function over the long term if the citizens have faith in the politicians they elect. That is the reason why, for a long time, there has been an intense debate in political science, political marketing and politics itself about how trust in the institutions as well as politics, can be increased.

Trust as a Political Factor: Including or Marginalizing

The Problem of Political Trust, 2018

Based on a rereading of philosophical and empirical literature, this paper challenges and revises the political and sociological understanding of trust. Given recent turmoil in democracies, basic assumptions of political thought and action, especially trust, are under the spotlight. Political controversies have been characterized in terms of popular distrust in government, political establishments, public figures and neoliberal policies. Social surveys report 'declining' political trust throughout democratic countries. Trust, or lack thereof, has been used to explain a huge variety of things, however, from fish behaviour to the global financial crisis – a big workload for one word. It appears, moreover, as a political 'solvent' that works for the left and the right, liberal and conservative. Existing definitions and conceptualizations of trust are narrow and partial, based on an essentialist and individualistic model that is often transactional, self-interested and economistic, failing to take account of normative-cultural contexts. They call for reformulation. To do this, we need to go back to the beginning and ask how and why 'trust' entered into the modern political lexicon (through Locke, Burke and Mill), displacing older concepts, notably philía and fides. This paper asks how trust evolved from a quality of personal relationships into a critical factor for political institutions and representation, and thence to an abstract and impersonal factor that applies now to complex systems, including monetary systems – following Luhmann and Giddens. Given the inclusive ideals of trust models, there are also concerns about 'trust gaps' across racial and socioeconomic divides, and distrust may be a rational response to change and to marginalization. We need to reexamine how trust has been defined and deployed in contemporary social sciences, and so to disrupt and reconstitute its conceptual framework, along historical-dialectical lines. Reconceiving trust in pragmatic, dialectical and relational terms, including speech-act theory, better comprehends the kinds of exchanges that actively and reflexively form the concept itself. As a properly political factor, we find that trust is always 'in doubt' and 'in progress'.

The Role of Trust in Political Systems. A Philosophical Perspective

Open Political Science

The paper analyzes the question of whether trust is an essential condition for the functioning of social and political systems; it approaches the issue from a philosophical perspective. Trust appears in both interpersonal relationships (interpersonal trust) and in societal and political institutions (social and political trust, respectively). In the political literature trust is sometimes characterized as ‘an expectation of continued value’. Although the same literature distinguishes social from political trust, the thesis advanced here is that, logically, all forms of trust must be characterized as an inductive generalization from past experience to future expectations of the continuation of some specifiable utilities (goods, services). As such, trust suffers from Humean reservations about inductive inferences. Trust as an expectation of the continued provision of utilities, on the institutional level, will be characterized as a first-order sort of trust. It can be disappointed wit...

How can we trust a political leader? Ethics, institutions, and relational theory

International Political Science Review, 2020

That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authentic communication requires genuine commitment, which is conceptually at odds with self-interested reasoning. This article finds that both incentives and genuine commitment are necessary conditions for trustworthiness in speech, but neither is sufficient on its own. The problem is thus how to combine them. Examining the work of Habermas and Bourdieu, this article develops a relational perspective on authentic communication. It suggests that latent institutions can induce trust by making trustworthiness preferable, and still allow speakers to ...

Democratic Politics and the Circles of Trust

Trust Matters, 2021

Meetings in Ethics and Political Philosophy in 2019. I thank all participants there for their comments. Special thanks go to the editors of this volume, Raquel Barradas de Freitas and Sergio Lo Iacono for their excellent and helpful feedback, and to Carlo Burelli for his continuous intellectual support. is research has been made possible by a Marie Curie Fellowship, project number 836571.

An Analysis on the Trust in Media Politics

Revista de Cercetare si Interventie Sociala, 2020

Debates over trust in media politics have constantly engaged developed or developing countries over the years. As a result of misleading and/or biased attitude of most of the media politics organisations, audience trust in media politics is aff ected negatively. This study investigates the trust in media politics according to the educational level of adults living in Northern Cyprus (TRNC). The scope of the study focuses on several questions such as which mass communication media politics or what type of news in addition to remarks on audience trust in Northern Cyprus based media politics news. The study discusses the degree of audience trust depending on the media politics organisations and type of news they follow.