trust

I found this YouTube video from the UK to be interesting, as it shows a young person trying to sort out politics and questioning democracy in light of the media and capitalism. The video description by Annika sets up the current situation in the UK {from 2 January 2010}::

“Only 76% of Brits bother to vote. Even worse, only 54% of Americans vote.

The present Parliament which first met on 11 May 2005 is scheduled to expire at midnight on 10 May 2010. The next United Kingdom general election is due to take place on or before Thursday 3 June 2010. The governing Labour Party will be looking to secure a fourth consecutive term in office and to restore support lost since 1997. The Conservative Party will seek to regain its dominant position in politics after losses in the 1990s, and to replace Labour as the governing party. The Liberal Democrats hope to make gains from both sides; although they too would ideally wish to form a government, their more realistic ambition is to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.”

The distrust of the institutions of political parties is an issue in the US, Canada, and the UK, which causes Annika to discount the rhetoric, as well as the spin by the institution of the media. My concerns are that the political institutions and infotainment are turning people off of politics.

While the use of social media, such as YouTube and what Annika is doing, can decentralize information dissemination and foster dialog, does the attention economy bring us right back to large numbers of people going to “destination websites” and what does this do to the signal-to-noise ratio? Also, how can social media be used to foster civil discourse and the exchange of ideas, as opposed to shouting at each other?

While some may think Annika’s thoughts about democracy to be rather cynical, I think it’s a good point of departure for politicians to address the issue of why democracy does matter despite the influence of media and capitalism that can serve to make citizens feel as though it doesn’t. Particularly in the midst of the Big Recession, where government is the bearer of bad news regardless of ideological leaning.

Twitterversion:: Politics & distrust of political parties and media’s influence. Can democracy be made salient? Can true dialog be fostered by social media? #ThickCulture @Prof_K
Song:: Sparklehorse-‘Getting It Wrong’

A recent report from Pew has an interactive map on perceptions of trust of the government. There are also key events that attempt to contextualize the trends, as well as charts with changes in the House and incumbent losses. In 1992, Clinton inherited slipping trust from George H. W. Bush and Reagan inherited low, but rebounding numbers from Carter.

Should we expect a bloodbath in this fall’s midterms?

I think both parties need to be concerned, particularly given the trends on this chart::

Under George W. Bush, trust was in freefall for everyone in his second term. In my opinion, there was a perfect storm, which literally involved a storm. Katrina hit in 2005 and the conservative coalition started to break down, which I think became evident in the Harriet Miers nomination for the Supreme Court. The 2006 midterms with a surge of Democrat wins and Obama’s election in 2008 served to further cause Republicans to have less trust in the government.

Politicians on either side of the aisle should heed the antecedents of trust, in order to increase the odds of getting votes. In my opinion, negative rhetoric that doesn’t address increasing trustworthiness for a focal candidate is a danger.

What are the drivers of trust?

I’m working on a paper on organizational trust, based on the social psychology literature. The three antecedents of trust my co-author and I are using are::

1. Ability
2. Integrity
3. Benevolence

These are subject to contextual constraints, i.e., the current economy and the political zeitgeist which is up in the air regarding big or small government. The challenge is to craft a strategy to build trust. In a sense, Obama’s reaching across to Republicans should be appealing to benevolence, but it’s not. It may be overshadowed by integrity and ability, which given the economic woes will be hard to convince Obama’s detractors that his policies are leading us in the right direction, given the credence qualities {hard to gauge efficacy even after implementation} of economic policy. If obama and the Democrats don’t realize that this is a battle of “communication” that needs to be addressed quickly, expect losses in November.

Twitterversion:: New Pew study shows trust of the government at only 22% and for Republicans an all-time low. How can social psych. inform political strategy? @Prof_K

Song:: KMFDM-‘Trust’

Bummer chart of the day….unless you’re in the military, or a devoted misanthrope.  new data from the 2008 General Social Survey shows declining levels of trust for every institution in the United States except for the military and education.

What accounts for this mass scale institutional distrust?  I think Robert Putnam has a book that talks about this stuff 🙂  One way of looking at all this is to weep for civil society and make the Putnam argument that this is evidence of a decline in social capital.  If we all had each other over for dinner, we’d trust each other more and thus trust the public institutions in which we all have a stake.

I think there’s a lot to this, but I’d offer we also this of this cynicism as increased expectations.  As society has become more inured to mass marketing appeals, we’ve become more desirous of more transparency and more effectiveness from our institutions.  This increased demand that our institutions produce more can be damaging int that they may not be designed to produce at a high level (I’m looking at you California government).  But they can also be the result of a sense of greater agency and efficacy amongst the public in general.

We’ve become a high standards people.  That can redound to our benefit if people back up their high expectations with a sense of engagement.  I fear that our “high expectations” culture is devolving into a flabby grousing about corrupt politicians without any real intention of addressing the problem.

HT: Social Capital Blog