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

Markus Holdo

doi:10.1177/0192512120913572

Abstract

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 earn citizens’ trust through genuine ethical commitment.

Highlights

Scholars from various subfields of political and social theory have been drawn to the idea of authentic communication, the type of interaction where speakers address listeners with sincerity and truthfulness
Important questions that are not answered satisfactorily by either ethics or incentives have thereby been overlooked: how can institutions be designed to help citizens judge whether speakers are sincere and truthful as opposed to using an image of authenticity for tactical purposes? How can citizens acknowledge and respond to leaders’ genuine ethical convictions and at the same time recognize the critical role that institutional incentives and constraints play in shaping leaders’ possibilities to deceive and for holding them accountable? Previous research has correctly treated Habermas’ perspective as a normative theory of authentic communication and Bourdieu’s perspective as a theoretical framework to understand actors’ self-interested reasons to commit to norms of sincerity and truthfulness
Bernard Williams writes that we find others to be trustworthy in speech when we recognize that they “think that trustworthy behaviour, such as keeping one’s word, has an intrinsic value, that it is a good thing to act as a trustworthy person acts, just because that is the kind of action it is” (Williams, 2010: 90)

Summary

Introduction

While the concept of habitus helps us understand why people may be objectively oriented toward strategic goals while not intentionally acting to pursue them, it cannot, replace genuine ethical commitment as a reason to trust a speaker.

Results

Conclusion