Therefore, we will make a distinction between institutionalised trust and a lack
of institutionalised trust.
2.2). What is Institutionalised trust?
The key separation between ‘Institutional trust’ and ‘trust in government’ is that
citizens are not making an evaluation of a particular individual or a particular
group of individuals and therefore, are making a judgement on whether they can
trust the actual political institutions themselves. Deriving from Gambetta’s
definitions of trust generally institutional trust can be defined as rational
evaluation and expectation that the institution will ‘perform satisfactorily’
(Carlsson et al, 2018, p.3) This phrase Carlsson et al use is extremely vague and
doesn’t allude to specific actions that determine whether an institution
performs ‘satisfactorily’ or not. Therefore, this report will answer the questions
that remain about how institutions can be analysed to be perceived as
performing satisfactorily by citizens. Dasgupta goes further by saying that you
will not trust the government or any institution - to do on balance what is
expected of it if you do not trust that it will be thrown out of power if it does not
do on balance what is expected of it (2000, p.50). In other words, institutions are
trusted when the mechanisms of accountability are available to ostracize
individuals that are incompetent or aren’t delivering what is expected.
Accountability is closely linked to trust in institutions and can be used to
determine the amount of trust there is in institutions however, this report will
focus on the impact that trust has on the nature of political participation and
further research could investigate the key significance of accountability for trust.
In the case of political institutions Dasgupta refers to the accountability of
government and if citizens feel that they are not able to practice their democratic
right by removing an individual or changing policy direction then trust in
49
Made with FlippingBook HTML5