Trust and Distrust

Abstract

With no deliberate plan, during the 19th century the American state built a huge, if clanking, machine for the integration of trust into public politics. Perhaps I should say the American states , since the mediation of national elections and other political activity by individual states provided opportunities for local and regional integration that a highly centralized system would have inhibited. As a result, three elements of American political life connected: 1) first-past-the-post elections in which victors gained the spoils while losers forsook the advantages of office; 2) patron-client chains tuned to the dispensation of jobs, political favors, and payoffs in return for political support; and 3) trust networks grounded in migration, ethnicity, religion, kinship, friendship, and work. American electoral campaigns in particular brought these elements together in vivid displays of partisanship. The three elements represent much broader phenomena that figure in public politics everywhere: available forms of political participation; social relations among participants; and variable connections between trust networks and public politics. Their intersection matters because most historical combinations of political participation, social relations, and connections between trust networks and public politics have inhibited democratization rather than promoting it. Only certain combinations of the three make democratic politics possible. The next three chapters examine how those combinations come into being and how they produce their effects. This chapter concentrates on the place of trust and distrust in the formation of democratic regimes.