Is trust always necessary for effective functioning of complex systems such as organizations or societies? If communities are pervaded with distrust, how can they start reverting the vicious cycles and build trust, or – at least – stop escalating distrust? How this can be done in contemporary VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world? Or perhaps it would be wise to move beyond trust-distrust dichotomy and look for ways alternative or complementary to trust in organizing our collective lives? In this lecture I will explore questions around the processes of trust and distrust as well as dynamics between them through integrating insights from several theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Dramatic economic and political developments since 2008 have brought renewed attention to how Europeans evaluate the institutions and outcomes of their political systems. This talk focuses on how citizens’ evaluations of the performance of welfare state services and policies impact on more generalized confidence in democratic institutions and actors (i.e. “political trust”). Has the link between welfare state performance dissatisfaction and political distrust become stronger? What in turn explains performance evaluations? Do they respond to relevant information and objective indicators or are they rather products of political predispositions such as ideological orientations or political trust itself? Finally, what aspects of performance matter? Is output quality/generosity of delivered services and social protection the only key factor? Or perhaps people are equally sensitive to “procedural fairness” in service and welfare delivery as well as perceived welfare state “sustainability”, i.e. whether the public sector can afford to maintain services and protection in an era of growing fiscal challenges.

In the ‘golden age of regulation” in general and the rise of the regulatory state in particular, it is useful to explore alternatives to state, direct and hierarchical regulation. Enhanced forms of self-regulation may overcome the weaknesses of traditional regulation and may offer advantages in the form of greater public trust. This paper asks whether and under which conditions will the public feel it can trust market actors in different forms of enhanced self-regulation. It uses two web-based experimental surveys (Study 1: N=597; Study 2: N =598) to examine public trust in a hypothetical Fintech company under different regulatory designs. In the first study, we explore the extent of which different types of state regulation regimes encourage public trust in the regulated entity. In the second study, we explore the degree in which six different forms of self-regulation can equal state regulation in providing trust. Our findings show that self-regulatory regimes, in varying forms, gain lesser levels of public trust comparing to state-regulation regimes. We also found evidence that self-regulatory regimes could lead to more trust of the public in the regulated entity if the public trusts the regulator. Finally, we found that public trust of regulatees depends more upon the likelihood of sanctions imposed on violations.

I will speak about the primary findings of my book, Anti/Vax: Reframing the Vaccination Controversy, and discuss my evolving thinking in the Covid-era, focusing on "misinformation" and "confidence" as framing for vaccine hesitancy. In particular, the talk will open a conversation about whether we should focus so much on belief as a driver of vaccine dissent and why vaccination programs are so seemingly fragile.

Never has the value of therapeutic innovation — to global health and the global economy — been more starkly visible. And yet the value of therapies depends on the extent to which people believe in them, especially in the presence of positive spillovers as we see with vaccines. Credible regulation — science-driven, independent and transparent evaluation of therapies by the government, functionally separate (and institutionally separable) from the product’s sponsor and marketers — is a crucial source of this product credibility. When in the summer of 2020 the FDA was wracked by criticism and doubt under a Trump Administration pressure campaign to approve any and all treatments, the expressed willingness of Americans to take a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine declined by 10 percentage points or more. Plausible back-of-the-envelope calculations suggests that such declines in vaccine adherence would be associated with economically calculable losses of one trillion dollars or more. While causality is impossible to establish with the observational data available, major actors in the health sphere strategically responded to the Trump Administration’s pressure as if this causal chain were true, in other words, as if a credible regulation equilibrium were at stake. The Summer 2020 FDA credibility crisis, then, exposed the credibility value of approval regulation institutions. And the case of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is more generalizable. When credible regulation declines, rational consumption/utilization of beneficial products declines with it. Reigning methods of regulatory evaluation, including all forms of benefit-cost analysis currently being used in American governance, fail to appreciate, measure or calculate the credibility benefits of robust regulatory institutions.

Do governance reforms affect public acceptance of regulatory decisions, and if so how? We tackled this critical but under-studied question through a pair of linked survey experiments on public attitudes towards the reform of EU pesticides regulation, a highly salient and politically contested issue, among a representative sample of the adult population in six EU member states (DE, FR, IT, NL, PL, SE; n=9000). First, we conducted a conjoint experiment to study whether and how the specific design of decision-making procedures impact public support for EU pesticide regulation. We asked respondents to rate and choose between randomly assigned policy packages, covering five dimensions of proposed reform of EU pesticides authorization (the level of decision making, the factors to be considered, the sources of evidence, whether or not there is systematic post-authorization monitoring and review, and the effects on food prices). In a second linked experiment to analyse how regulatory decision-making procedures impact the acceptance of their outcomes, we asked respondents whether they believed that farmers should be allowed to use Glyphosate, the best known and most controversial pesticide. We then showed respondents one of the policy packages that they had rated most highly, and asked them if they would be prepared to accept an authorization decision on Glyphosate that ran counter to their prior expressed preference if it were taken under the regulatory decision-making procedure they supported. The results clearly demonstrate that the adoption of a regulatory decision-making procedure that people (strongly) support makes them substantially more willing to accept (or not oppose) a hypothetical authorization decision contrary to their prior expressed preference. The effect is stronger for supporters than opponents of Glyphosate, but is also visible and significant among the latter. While levels of trust in national governments, the EU, and business respectively have some influence on preferences over certain dimensions of the policy package (notably the level of decision making and the sources of evidence considered), they do not have a significant effect on decision acceptance. By contrast, the inclusion of post-authorization monitoring and review, which has the strongest effect on respondents’ support for a proposed decision-making procedure, also significantly increases their willingness to accept a hypothetical Glyphosate decision that runs counter to their prior expressed preference. Our study thus provides strong evidence that governance reforms which citizens substantively support can enhance acceptance of regulatory decisions that run counter to their prior expressed preferences, even on highly contentious and politicized issues such as the authorization and use of pesticides.

In its early stages, the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to mobilize quickly and comprehensively, drawing not only on public resources and coordination capabilities but also on the cooperation and buy-in of civil society. Political and institutional legitimacy are crucial determinants of effective crisis management, and low-trust states lacking such legitimacy suffer a profound disadvantage. We examine Hong Kong as a case where failure to respond effectively could have been expected due to low levels of public trust and political legitimacy, but where, in fact, crisis response was unexpectedly successful. The case calls for a more nuanced understanding of policy capacity, including how social behaviours and norms are structured and reproduced amidst existential uncertainties and policy ambiguities. We propose the concept of community capacity to fill this conceptual gap.

The proliferation of surveillance technology during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a myriad of responses from the public. We posit that public trust and confidence in state control policies employing these technologies is tenuous at best, and the trust-deficit has had a significant impact on the efficacy of the control measures. An examination of varied social responses under different control measures (including an escalated use of surveillance technology during the pandemic) has revealed different sources of disquiet which we have classified under six broad themes: disquiet about the data collected; disquiet concerning authority styles confirming control responses; disquiet regarding the integral architecture of control strategies employed; disquiet surrounding infringement of rights and liberties; disquiet surrounding the role of private sector; as well as uncertainties regarding a post-pandemic world and its “new normal”. Without genuinely engaging and including citizens into the conceptualisation, development, implementation and decommissioning of policies and tech, data subjects are relegated to data objects. In this presentation, we argue that principled design and citizen inclusion at crucial stages of pandemic control responses can preserve the rights and integrity of all individuals during the crisis (and beyond) without jeopardising efficacy. We reject the position that there must be a trade-off between personal data protection and health security. In our work, digital self-determination has the potential to make surveillance technologies (including the data it produces and shares) more legitimate from the data subject’s perspective, thereby aiding in more robust control policies.

This work examines how trust influences business regulation across countries. Empirical analysis reveals that more trusting countries adopt fewer regulations. In addition, we document that trust reduces demand for regulation, and it positively relates to a high‐quality business environment, supporting a substitution hypothesis. Furthermore, business regulation no longer leads to poor economic outcomes once trust is included in the analysis. These findings suggest that lack of trust, not regulation per se, explains ‘bad’ outcomes documented in prior literature. Distrust predicts regulation and that it is a cause of economic inefficiency.

Blockchain technology was created as a response to the trust crisis that swept the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems were presented as a “trustless” alternative to existing financial institutions and even governments. Yet, while the trustless nature of blockchain technology has been heavily questioned, little research has been done as to what blockchain technologies actually bring to the table in place of trust. This presentation draws from the extensive academic discussion on the concepts of “trust” and “confidence” to argue that blockchain technology is not a ‘trustless technology’ but rather a ‘confidence machine’. First, the presentation provides a review of the multifaceted conceptualisations of trust and confidence, and the relationship between these two concepts. Second, the claim is made that blockchain technology relies on cryptographic rules, mathematics, and game-theoretical incentives in order to increase confidence in the operations of a computational system. Yet, such an increase in confidence ultimately relies on the proper operation and governance of the underlying blockchain-based network, which requires trusting a variety of actors. Third, the presentation turns to legal, constitutional and polycentric governance theory to explore the governance challenges of blockchain-based systems, in light of the tension between procedural confidence and trust.

As the Covid-19 crisis proceeds, motivating citizens to continue to comply with regulations that impact heavily on the life that they were accustomed to before the outbreak, gets more and more challenging. The literature shows convincing evidence that trust in government (regulator) has a positive impact on rule compliance, both under normal conditions and in times of crisis. In this seminar Frédérique Six, together with Monika Glavina, present and compare insights from several theoretical perspectives and provide implications for practice.

The ongoing digital transformation of government and markets is accompanied by a decline of trust in both public authorities and tech giants. From Cambridge Analytica to the Dutch SyRi case, citizens increasingly invoke rules for a fairer and more transparent use of powerful technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things: the hectic debate emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of digital technologies to contain the spread of the contagion is consistent with this trend. The European Union is responding with a new wave of regulation on digital platforms, data spaces, cybersecurity, and in particular AI. Will this lead to defining what is trust in digital technology? Does this imply changing the Internet, and the way we use it?

This lecture will approach trust and its importance for sustainable democracy from the perspective of individual citizens: What they need and what they believe. On the one hand, our current institutions are serving these needs very well, in no small part by moulding choices and tastes to suit what powerful governments and large corporations are wanting to deliver. On the other hand, these same institutions are delegitimizing themselves as respected authorities at an alarming rate. For many citizens, deference to them and the power they wield is difficult to accept. In this way the democratic fabric of our societies is incrementally being weakened. How do we change this trend? How do we build contestable trust and realistic collective hopes for our society? This lecture will provide insights into the human dimensions of trust and hope that should be considered as we adapt to new institutional settings emerging with new technologies, environmental catastrophes, global pandemics and the social havoc and unrest that they bring.

Why some territories have performed better than others in the fight against COVID-19? Building on previous literature showing that both social trust and institutional trust are protective factors against epidemics, this paper explores how social and political divisions may explain the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we argue that it is not only levels, but also variations in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non-supporters – what matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro-healthy behavior. Second, we hypothesize that polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality, for it is more difficult for governments to build consensus with opposition parties to undertake unpopular yet necessary measures, and more tempting to take measures aimed at satisfying core constituencies (e.g. business interests) rather than at controlling the pandemic. Using a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 153 European regions, we find evidence of how social and political divisions are associated to more deaths.

The current worldwide COVID19 pandemic has required the rapid and drastic adoption of social distancing and protective measures as the leading method for reducing the spread of the disease and death. Recreancy is the concept used to describe the relationship between trust and risk. In this perspective the element of trust refers to the public’s trust that social institutions will respond to social risks (Freudenberg, 1993). In social risk situations, such as epidemics, trust in the government to respond effectively, trust in health institutions to provide accurate guidelines on prevention and treatment, and trust in the media to provide accurate information are important for the public to feel that their health interests will be attended to in the best manner possible (Shao and Hao, 2020).The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to investigate cross culturally the sources of trust in social and political institutions and how this trust is converted in adoption of social distance and preventive measures. In this presentation, I will discuss and present empirical evidence on the role of political identification and trust in social institutions translated in different results in Brazil, U.S.A., China and Israel. Our findings highlight the role of partisan membership as a fundamental source of trust in the government and how different approaches resulted in different social policies eroding the trust of citizens in the political sytems and their ability to deal with the pandemic crisis.

Large-scale vaccination with an eventual COVID19 vaccine is considered by most governments and citizens to be the ultimate solution of the current health crisis. However, vaccination hesitancy, intensified by anti-vax movements, is a major problem, both in normal times and in health crises. During this seminar, Koen Verhoest, will together with Dr. Sophie Op de Beeck and Dr. Monika Glavina, review the theoretical and empirical insights in literature on the effect of trust on vaccination hesitancy and vaccination refusal and discuss its explanatory power in relation to other relevant factors. They will also discuss recent findings on vaccination hesitancy in the context of the COVID19 crisis.

Contemporary circumstances reveal the distinction between trustworthy provision of goods and services, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of those in power, on the other hand. It is that distinction I want to explore.