The Trust Crisis

Yann Algan, Professor and Dean of Sciences Po's School of Public Affairs, discusses the role trust has played in the rise of populism. This article was originally published in the 2019 G7 Global Leaders Report.

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The rise of anti-system forces and populism testifies to a deep trust crisis of citizens, both towards their institutions and others, as we show in a new book, The Origins of Populism (FR) (with D. Cohen, E. Beasley, M. Foucault). Votes for anti-system parties have been fueled, first and foremost, by a sharp deterioration of citizens’ trust in their institutions, experts and elites over the last three decades. According to the World Values Survey, since the early 80s, the share of people who do not trust Parliament has increased from 47% to 77% in the United States, from 37% to 64% in France, and from 60% to 77% in Britain.

The erosion of trust in institutions seems closely linked to the deterioration of the living conditions of the middle and lower classes, who have been hit by economic insecurity and rising inequalities, especially since the 2008 economic crisis. The financial crisis provoked immense resentment towards the traditional political parties, who were considered incapable of protecting the popular classes from the disturbances of contemporary capitalism. Beyond the financial crisis, the failure of governments and institutions to protect people from more structural risks such as the expansion of inequalities, globalization or the digital transition, has further fueled distrust. As an illustration, in a series of articles analyzing the “China Shock”, David Autor and his co-authors highlight the effects of globalization on the destruction of employment in American industrial strongholds, which have led to a strong resentment towards institutions and a political radicalization. The digital revolution and rising inequality have had the same effect in Europe and the United States.

But the rise of anti-system forces tells us something more about trust: it also refers to the feeling of loneliness of individuals and, more generally, to a degraded relationship with others. This is where another essential dimension of trust is at work: trust in others. This distrust crisis seems to be also linked to a civilizational crisis: the emergence of a society of isolated individuals in our post-industrial world. Industrial society and the Fordist model were based on enterprises organizing the socialization of workers within the enterprise, including the presence of powerful unions. The post-industrial society has exploded this structuring of common spaces: the development of services and new ways of working has been accompanied by greater social loneliness. The same loneliness is at work in our territories. Driven out from cities and large metropolises, the middle and lower classes are over-represented in mid-size units where local services, whether public services or bakeries, have collapsed. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, we have moved from a class society, not to a mass society, but to a society of individuals. In the post-industrial society, interpersonal trust is what remains for individuals to develop a common social project, which implies urgent policies to rebuild trust.

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