Rebuilding trust in an era of widening wealth inequality

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 73-91

  Lenard, Patti Tamara ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84880514773     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2009.01479.x     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. APSA, "American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality," Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (2004): 651-66.
2. Soren Holmberg, "Down and Down We Go: Political Trust in Sweden," in Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, ed. Pippa Norris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 169-87;
3. Virginia A. Chanley, Thomas J. Rudolph, and Wendy M. Rahn, "The Origins and Consequences of Public Trust in Government: A Time Series Analysis," Public Opinion Quarterly 64 (2000): 239-56;
4. Mark J. Hetherington, Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005);
5. Robert V. Robinson and Elton F. Jackson, "Is Trust in Others Declining in America? An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis," Social Science Research 30, no. 1 (2001): 117-45.
6. Jane Mansbridge, "Social and Cultural Causes of Dissatisfaction with U. S. Government," in Why People Don't Trust Government, ed. Joseph S. Nye, Philip Zelikow, and David C. King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 133-54;
7. Mark E. Warren, "Democracy and Deceit: Regulating Appearances of Corruption," American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 1 (2006): 160-74;
8. Mark E. Warren, "What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?," American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (2004): 328-43.
9. David Miller, "What's Left of the Welfare State?," Social Philosophy and Policy 21, no. 1 (2003): 92-112. This distinction is often clearer in theory than in practice. Publicly provided health care, for example, is one standard example of an insurance scheme. In practice, however, it often has an egalitarian element to it, in the sense that it is funded by a system of progressive taxation in which the poorest members of society are not forced to contribute (much) to the scheme, even as they are permitted to access health care on an equal basis.
10. Annette Baier, "Trust and Anti-Trust," Ethics 96, no. 2 (1986): 231-60.
11. Orlando Patterson, "Liberty against the Democratic State," in Democracy and Trust, ed. Mark E. Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 151-207.
12. Sonja Zmerli and Ken Newton, "Social Trust and Attitudes toward Democracy," Political Opinion Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2008): 706-24.
13. This distinction is drawn in myriad ways in the literature on trust. Political/institutional/vertical trust is distinguished from social/interpersonal/horizontal trust. For more on these distinctions and how they are drawn, see among others: Eric Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
14. Kenneth Newton, "Social and Political Trust in Established Democracies," in Critical Citizens, ed. Pippa Norris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 169-88;
15. Patti Tamara Lenard, "Trust Your Compatriots but CountYour Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy," Political Studies 56, no. 2 (2008): 312-32.
16. Zmerli and Newton, "Social Trust and Attitudes"; Uslaner, Moral Foundations of Trust.
17. David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
18. This claim finds empirical support, as well. See for example Zmerli and Newton, "Social Trust and Attitudes toward Democracy";
19. Max Kaase, "Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust, and Non-Institutionalised Political Participation in Western Europe," West European Politics 22, no. 3 (1999): 1-21.
20. Donatella Della Porta, "Social Capital, Beliefs in Government and Political Corruption," in Disaffected Democracies: What's Troubling the Trilateral Countries?, ed. Susan Pharr and Robert Putnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 202-30.
21. A discussion of the components of democratic legitimacy will take me too far from the central questions I am addressing here. See, instead: Christopher Anderson, Andre Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Ola Listhaug, Losers' Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
22. Joshua Cohen, "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy," in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 67-92;
23. Seyla Benhabib, "Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy," Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 26-52;
24. J. Knight and J. Johnson, "Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy," Political Theory 22, no. 2 (1994): 277-96.
25. Robert Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
26. Miller, On Nationality.
27. John Rawls, "Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus," in The Idea of Democracy, ed. D. Copp, J. Hampton, and J. Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 245-69.
28. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 223-51.
29. Barbara Arneil, Diverse Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
30. Arash Abizadeh, "Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation? Four Arguments," American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 495-509.
31. Samuel Scheffler, "Immigration and the Significance of Culture," Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 2 (2007): 93-125.
32. Moreover, advocates of the shared public culture tend to support cultural continuity over cultural rigidity; they are concerned that, over time, the shared public culture persists in recognizable form by its members, but they do not require that the culture remains static and unchanging. See, for example, David Miller, "Immigration: The Case for Limits," in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, ed. Andrew Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 193-206.
33. For a more extensive discussion of the shared public culture argument, and its connection to trust, see Patti Tamara Lenard, "Shared Public Culture: A Reliable Source of Trust," Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 385-404.
34. For an insightful account of the relationship between trust and norms, see Amy Mullin, "Trust, Social Norms, and Motherhood," Journal of Social Philosophy 36, no. 3 (2005): 316-30.
35. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System, Vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
36. A recent example of how this works in cases of cultural conflict is beautifully illustrated in Monique Deveaux, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
37. Her observation overlaps with one that was made, also, by Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
38. Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
39. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Collins, 1969).
40. Amartya Sen, "Equality of What?," in Choice, Welfare and Measurement, ed. Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 353-70.
41. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
42. Iris Marion Young, Democracy and Inclusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
43. Elizabeth Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?," Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287-337;
44. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
45. American Political Science Association, "American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality."
46. For an account of these latter worries, see Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Volunteerism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
47. Robert Dahl, On Political Equality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
48. To cite just one example, see Karl Kaltenthaler, Stephen Ceccoli, and Ronald Gelleny, "Attitudes toward Eliminating Income Inequality in Europe," European Union Politics 9, no. 2 (2008): 217-41. The authors here argue that attitudinal differences concerning the importance of eliminating income inequality in Europe is a product of the ideas citizens believe they share about the society in which they live.
49. Julien Labonne, Dan Biller, and Rob Chase, "Inequality and Relative Wealth: Do They Matter for Trust?," Social Development Papers: Community Driven Development Paper 103 (2007).
50. Eric Uslaner, "Divided Citizens: How Inequality Undermines Trust in America," Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action (http://www.demos-usa.org) (2004), 10;
51. see Uslaner, Moral Foundations of Trust, chaps. 6 & 7 for the data that lead to this conclusion.
52. See also Andrew Leigh, "Does Equality Lead to Fraternity?," Economics Letters 93, no. 1 (2006): 121-25. Eric Uslaner is relying on responses to what is typically termed the general trust question, "do you believe that people can be trusted, or that in general you can't be too cautious with others?", as well as a series of proxies for trust. In general, he is making broad claims about social and political trust. Andrew Leigh is correlating the decline of interpersonal trust (what is here termed "social trust") with increases in inequality.
53. Uslaner, "Divided Citizens."
54. Leigh, "Does Equality Lead to Fraternity?";
55. Anthony Barnes Atkinson, "Increased Income Inequality in OECD Countries and the Redistributive Impact of the Government Budget," Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs (2004);
56. Ben Jackson and Paul Segal, "Why Inequality Matters," A Catalyst Working Paper (2004).
57. Labonne, Biller, and Chase, "Inequality and Relative Wealth";
58. Jennifer M. Mellor, Lisa R. Anderson, and Jeffrey Milyo, "An Experimental Study of the Effects of Inequality and Relative Deprivation on Trusting Behavior," College of William and Mary, Department of Economics Working Paper 14 (2005).
59. Of course, insurance can also be purchased on the private market - and doing so enables us to ensure additionally against the effects of both bad brute luck and bad option luck. This is a distinction that Ronald Dworkin draws. Brute luck is "a matter of how risks fall out that are not... deliberate gambles," whereas option luck "is a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out - whether someone gains or loses through accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and might have declined." Insurance policies thus serve, in some sense, to render brute luck a matter of option luck: "the decision to buy or reject... insurance is a calculated gamble." See Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
60. For more, see Kasper Lippert-Rasumussen, "Equality, Option Luck and Responsibility," Ethics 111 (2001): 548-79.
61. Miller, "What's Left of the Welfare State?"
62. Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).
63. Some accounts of trust suggest that extending it or otherwise is entirely a matter of self-interest. Russell Hardin is perhaps best known for advocating this view. See, for example: Russell Hardin, "Street-Level Epistemology and Democratic Participation," Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 212-29.
64. "'Welfare Queen' Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign," New York Times, February 15, 1976.
65. For more on this example, as well as on the strategies Ronald Regan employed to turn Americans against welfare, see Hetherington, Why Trust Matters.
66. Jonathan Wolff, "Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos," Philosophy and Public Affairs 27, no. 2 (1998): 97-122;
67. Daniel Weinstock, "Building Trust in Divided Societies," Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 3 (1999): 287-307.
68. For more on the relationship between trust and trustworthiness, see Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness.
69. This is a strategy described by "confidence-building" experts with respect to rebuilding communities that are torn apart by civil war. See, for example, Harold Saunders, A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts (New York: Macmillan, 2001).
70. Weinstock, "Building Trust in Divided Societies."