Explaining the democratic trust conundrum: the sources of institutional trust in the reunited Germany.

• Author: Grosskopf, Anke

Introduction

Democracies depend on trust more than any other form of government, but they are also the most successful at earning the trust of their citizens. Paradoxically, democratic governments try to engender trust by institutionalizing distrust into the structures of government. (1) Yet surprisingly, in many countries, citizens most trust the one political institution that controls their lives, but that they themselves cannot democratically control: their constitutional court. The important question of how and why this democratic trust conundrum occurs has so far remained unanswered despite our increasing knowledge about trust and the growing policy-making powers of constitutional courts.

This study explores the nature and origins of the democratic trust conundrum by analyzing institutional trust in the reunited Germany. By utilizing the unique, quasi-experimental conditions of German reunification, it is possible to compare institutions with identical powers that are 'old' and 'well-established' in West Germany, while they are 'new' and 'not well-established' in East Germany. This approach allows for a comparison of the origins and nature of trust in the various institutions of government in East Germany against the baseline of West Germany, while holding equal (as much as possible) the institutional context, as well as other factors such as language, culture, and historical background (except, of course, the respective experiences as separate states in the period between the division of Germany after World War II and its reunification in 1990). Establishing a baseline of trust is important because without it, one cannot offer any meaningful interpretation of trust levels. In other words, without establishing baselines of trust, it is impossible to analyze how and why people come to trust their unelected constitutional court more than their elected institutions of government. The historical accident of German division and eventual reunification thus provides an excellent quasi-laboratory setting for analyzing the democratic trust conundrum.

Despite the advantages of such a quasi-experimental design, the sources of institutional trust remain notoriously hard to disentangle because good data are scarce. Not only are questions of institutional trust asked only sporadically on most longitudinal survey projects, but good measures of relevant independent variables are also rare, forcing sometimes awkward operationalization of measures. (2) This study therefore takes a multi-method approach to overcome the inherent limits of secondary data analysis by complementing quantitative analysis of data from the 2002 German General Social Survey ALLBUS (3) with rich, qualitative focus group data collected in Germany that same year. (4)

Trust and the Democratic Trust Conundrum

Trust has rightfully been called "the chicken soup of social life" because it is the vital, yet mysterious ingredient that promotes social cohesion. (5) It is so vital that declining levels of trust in government in many advanced industrialized democracies, including Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, have become a growing cause of concern. (6) Despite many attempts to explain it, the etiology of trust in government remains as mysterious and contested as the definitive recipe for chicken soup. Before one can explore the etiology of institutional trust, however, one must first define the concept itself.

The Concept of Institutional Trust

Institutional trust is an aspect of legitimacy, and as such is closely related to (though not exactly the same as) David Easton's "notions of political support," (7) and to what Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba refer to as "allegiance to the political system." (8) For each of these political scientists, such attitudes are crucial because the congruence (or lack thereof) between citizens' expectations and structures of government determines long-term system stability. But systems consist of many parts, so the literature distinguishes between different types of support based upon political referent of support: the political community, the regime, and the authorities. (9) Since this study seeks to understand differences in attitudes towards various institutions of government, the focus is on what Easton calls the regime level (i.e., institutions established by the rules and procedures that delineate the political division of labor.) (10)

The literature further distinguishes between specific (i.e., output-related) and diffuse (i.e., a "reservoir of favorable attitudes or good will that helps members to accept or tolerate outputs to which they are opposed or the effects of which they see as damaging to their wants") support. (11) Some have argued that the legitimacy or diffuse support of institutions should be conceptualized as institutional loyalty (i.e., as citizens' unwillingness to contemplate alterations to the institutional roles and responsibilities), (12) thus further contrasting the structural aspects of institutional legitimacy with evaluations of specific institutional outputs or policies. But this legitimacy of institutional structures enables citizens to tolerate specific institutional policies whose substance they find normatively objectionable.

Although specific and diffuse support are often described as opposites, they are nonetheless related to each other. Diffuse, holistic evaluations of institutions are thought to be shaped by long-term experiences with institutional performance (specific support) in the form of a long-term "running tally." (13) Given the connection between these concepts, diffuse and specific support are the extreme poles of a continuum of support, with many related forms of support in-between.

Trust in institutions is one of these intermediary forms of support that is situated close to the center of this continuum, approximately halfway between Easton's notions of diffuse and specific support. As sociologist Nicklas Luhmann notes, trust functions as a "mechanism for the reduction of social complexity" by mitigating uncertainty over future behavior. (14) Thus, while trust in an institution should be related to its legitimacy and people's willingness to contemplate changes to its role, it also taps into citizens' expectations about that institution's future outputs or decisions. In that sense, the concept of institutional trust is located at the very nexus linking specific and diffuse support because it assesses how confident people are that they will receive agreeable institutional outputs in the long term. (15) In making such evaluations of trustworthiness, citizens must balance considerations of institutional structure against predictions regarding future institutional outputs.

While there are many different theories of trust, all share a common view of political trust as a relational concept that involves individuals' judgments about the trustworthiness of institutions. (16) These judgments lead to corresponding expectations that institutions will produce agreeable outcomes in the future, which, in turn, influence the behavior and attitudes of individuals towards these institutions (e.g., greater compliance, reduced vigilance). (17)

Democratic theory suggests that because power is always suspect, trust is most effectively established through procedures that institutionalize distrust into the democratic system by allowing citizens to hold public officials politically accountable. (18) For sociologist Piotr Sztompka, this represents the "first paradox of democracy":

Most of the principles constitutive of democratic order assume the institutionalization of distrust which provides a kind of backup or insurance for those who would be ready to risk trust, a disincentive for those who would contemplate breaches of trust, as well as a corrective of actual violations of trust, if they occur. [...] In brief: the more there is institutionalized distrust, the more there will be spontaneous trust. (19) Elections, checks and balances, the rule of law, and judicial review, among others, comprise a complex and interdependent system of institutionalized distrust that cultivates citizen trust in government by ensuring citizen influence over policy-making. In theory, then, the more institutions are controllable through various, interwoven layers of institutionalized distrust in democratic systems, the more citizens should consider them trustworthy. Legislatures, for example, are at the base of the system of institutional distrust because they are more democratically accountable than constitutional courts: Legislatures can be recalled through elections, and controlled through a system of checks and balances, as well as judicial review.

Constitutional courts, on the other hand, once established, control the legislature, as well as the law, but are bound only by the constitutions whose ultimate arbiters they are. While these would appear to be rather weak constraints on the court's power that should lead to low levels of public trust, empirically the inverse is true. It is well-established that at least in the United States, the Supreme Court, despite recent fights over nominees and its role in deciding the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, continues to be the most trusted institution of government. (20) This democratic trust conundrum is by no means unique to the United States. Like its American counterpart, the German Federal Constitutional Court enjoys considerably and consistently higher levels of trust than the other German institutions of government.

In 2002, for example, the Federal Constitutional Court boasted trust means more than one point higher than the trust means of both the Federal Parliament and the Federal Government (see Figure 1). This is a remarkable trust advantage for the Federal Constitutional Court, particularly since it is the only one of the three institutions that boasts mean support levels on the trusting side of the scale midpoint...