Is trust in government now a relic of the past?

As governments struggle with a loss of trust - cutting short chances of re-election and impacting policy in key areas- now is a good time to reconsider this slippery term

2024 may be remembered as the year incumbency became the kiss of death for governments worldwide. From France to South Korea, India to Argentina, ruling parties lost ground. Not just because of policy failures or scandals but also because trust in the governing parties seemed to fall away. This does not appear to be out of clear ideological conviction, but because populations simply no longer trust the governing party.

Survey data backs this up. The OECD's 2024 Drivers of Trust report found that, across member countries, only 39% of people had high or moderately high trust in their country's national government. In most countries surveyed, levels of low or no trust now exceed levels of trust — and among opposition voters, trust falls further still to just 26%.

This isn't just a mood swing. The pattern points to a deeper shift, a structural weakening of trust as social and political glue. And this matters because trust acts as a coordination mechanism, a source of legitimacy, and a way to smooth over the frictions of daily governance. Without it, governments must justify every action, defend every decision, and sell every policy from scratch. And when incumbents are not able to secure re-election because of this distrust, long-term planning becomes much harder. This is especially damaging in policy areas that rely on sustained commitment, like climate change, healthcare or economic reform. As trust disappears, governments fall into short-termism, chasing headlines over substance.

Yet for all its political importance, trust remains oddly under-studied in psychology, treating it either as the result of a by-product of childhood attachment, a rational gamble for how to conduct one's life or a cognitive shortcut. While these explanations have some value, these theories focus on individuals, not systems. What is missing here is a deeper account of how we navigate trust in the abstract: in institutions, brands, and technologies which dominate our lives yet we don't control or fully understand.

So maybe the question is no longer how we rebuild trust. Maybe we need to ask whether it still serves the role we imagine it does. What if it is declining not because it is broken but because it is becoming less relevant? And if that is the case, what might take its place? And what can a behavioural science of trust then look like?

The Lagos Paradox

The political turmoil now gripping many Western democracies is beginning to resemble the instability once associated with other parts of the world. Countries previously viewed as structurally volatile, where governments were frequently overturned or failed to deliver, now look increasingly similar to parts of Europe and North America. It seems the West is no longer immune to the same crisis of legitimacy it once diagnosed from afar.

And even when governments do deliver tangible results, trust does not always follow, something Venezuelan journalist Moisés Naím describes as the Lagos Paradox. This comes from an anecdote from Chile where, between 2000 and 2006, President Ricardo Lagos returned the country to relative stability after years of democratic crises. This led to new housing being built and public services expanded. Yet many residents, such as those in a poor Santiago neighbourhood, still voted him out of office. "The houses are nice," one explained, "but we don't have anywhere to park." This is often cited to evidence that expectations can change - so when things improve, the standard simply increases, and people fail to appreciate delivery. However, another way to consider this is that despite the improvements, people can still feel unseen, unheard, and fundamentally disconnected from the government that claims to serve them.

The OECD's data echoes this possibility. Only 30% of people across OECD countries find it likely that the political system lets people like them have a say. And just 30% believe governments can withstand lobbying by corporate actors when the public interest is at stake.

Meanwhile, the Ipsos Veracity Index (2024) finds that while professions like nurses (94% trust), doctors (88%), teachers (85%), and professors (85%) are highly regarded or have even regained trust post-pandemic, while politicians (11%) and government ministers (15%) remain at the bottom. These results point to a loss of trust in vertical professions, those associated with hierarchical power and what we might call distant decision-making, while functional or frontline roles retain credibility likely through emotional proximity and lived responsiveness.

What this perhaps reveals is more than just public frustration. It may be a signal that the terms on which trust is granted are shifting. Trust itself may be in transition as part of a broader reconfiguration of how societies are organised. To better understand this, we need to consider the role of trust within the history of how we manage societal relationships.

A historical perspective

To understand why trust in governments and other institutions feels so fragile now, we can turn to historian Geoffrey Hosking who argues it is really about expectations: the regulatory logic that means we can count on others when outcomes are uncertain. Throughout history, powerful systems were created to provide order and symbolic reassurance, offering people a map of what to expect and why it mattered.

On this basis, Hosking suggests that religion provided moral order and a cosmological framework that reassured people their actions mattered so we could trust others to act ethically. Money facilitated exchange by embodying mutual obligation and trust in future value. The nation-state created a sense of trust in a shared identity and purpose. These made large-scale coordination possible, enabling trust to extend beyond kinship networks into broader, more anonymous societies.

On this basis, trust is not a fixed psychological state but a flexible tool administered through a variety of mechanisms to manage cooperation, uncertainty, and authority. The challenge we have today, Hoskings would argue, is that the systems of government and other institutions no longer carry the same weight or legitimacy, leaving people uncertain about what they can reliably count on.

Hoskings suggests this is due to the way trust is bound up with power as a means of exercising authority, such as securing compliance, legitimising institutions, and naturalising certain norms. Looking at it this way, the decline of trust is not just a change in the social mood but a weakening in the effectiveness of the tools of power, a much more structural consideration. Seen this way, the decline of trust is not simply a mood but a shift in how power is sustained.

Of course, given that trust is one of the most efficient forms of wielding power, many will seek its restoration. However, its long-term decline and fragmentation suggest that this will not be easy, so perhaps the question is not how to rebuild trust but whether other forms of regulatory logic might take its place.

Lessons from honour: When social logics collapse

The radical notion that trust may not be a timeless feature at the centre of our society may seem more plausible when we consider another system, once central to social order: that of honour.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah sets out how, in pre-modern societies, honour was long held as the dominant regulatory logic. It defined legitimacy, reputation, and status through custom and ritual. Duels - formal, often weapon-based fights between individuals - were used to defend or restore one's honour after a perceived insult. The fact that people were willing to risk death over an insult may now seem absurd, but it points to a world where being seen to defend your honour was essential to maintaining social status and legitimacy.

As bureaucracies and welfare states took hold, then honour, with its reliance on personal reputation and custom, was gradually displaced by the rule of law, civic rights, and institutional protections. Of course, traces of honour still operate in areas like military codes, gang structures, schoolyard hierarchies, and celebrity feuds. As Appiah sets out, honour can still survive but go underground, having lost its organising relevance for mainstream political and cultural life.

As these administrative structures grew, they needed ways to manage large, anonymous populations - something honour, with its reliance on personal reputation and face-to-face accountability, simply couldn't scale to support. The rise of trust meant people would readily comply with decisions made by distant authorities, even if they didn't know exactly how things worked.

Trust therefore lets us believe in institutions and systems, such as pensions or public healthcare, not because we understand them fully, but because they feel stable and sufficiently fair to rely on. As such, trust became a kind of mass social shortcut, helping modern societies function at scale without everyone needing to see behind the curtain.

Does the erosion of trust signify something more systemic?

In this light, the erosion of default-trust may be better understood as a sign that the old ways of operating no longer make sense in today's world. Because what might be breaking down is not trust itself but the assumptions about who gets trusted, why, and on what terms.

To examine this, we can see that trust has never been evenly distributed but has always reflected the shape of power. Institutions built by and for dominant groups have long assumed the right to be trusted, while other groups have had to fight for credibility or operate in spaces where trust was fragile or withheld altogether.

Many marginalised communities, especially those racialised, dispossessed, or lacking full citizenship, have long lived with institutional mistrust as a baseline reality. These groups have often had to earn credibility in the eyes of institutions, or operate in environments where institutional trust in them was fragile, inconsistent, or withheld altogether. And their own trust in those institutions was equally fragile, shaped by histories of exclusion or harm.

In this sense, what we call a ‘crisis of trust’ may simply be the mainstream catching up to a condition others have long known. People are perhaps no longer defaulting to deference but instead are interrogating the sources of authority, questioning inherited credibility, and demanding that legitimacy be earned, not assumed. Like honour before it, trust may be losing its grip not because society is collapsing but because people are rethinking the basis on which they grant trust.

The Multidimensionality of trust

And our understanding of how trust may be eroding is better understood when we see how it is composed of multiple dimensions. This allows us to see more clearly the mechanisms underpinning the apparent changes.

To this end, we can draw on philosopher Philip Pettit who distinguishes between between three types: resilient trust (based on past consistency), rational trust (based on incentives and structures that make trust a safe bet), and goodwill trust (based on the belief that someone genuinely cares about your welfare).

These different elements of trust don't necessarily rise or fall in unison, and that's key to understanding what's happening with institutions today:

1. Resilient trust, the kind rooted in historical continuity and the expectation that governments will act as they always have, has perhaps taken the greatest hit. Scandals such as those in the UK, like the MPs' expenses scandal and ‘Partygate’, have made people doubt whether those in power still play by the rules. When institutions stop behaving in line with their own standards, the sense of long-term reliability begins to break down.

2. Rational trust, meanwhile, is being reconfigured. Instead of being placed in institutions or leaders, it is increasingly built into the mechanics of digital platforms. For example, the NHS app allows people to view health records, prescriptions, and vaccine status, a form of procedural visibility that builds trust through access and clarity. However, in other areas, such as universal credit applications, users describe feeling lost in the mechanics of the system.

3. Goodwill trust, the most relational form, is shifting too. Rather than looking to traditional public institutions for care or moral alignment, people are increasingly looking to peers, influencers, and mutual aid networks. This is particularly visible in health, where conventional expertise is increasingly supplemented and bypassed by peer-based trust networks.

Together, these shifts reflect not the end of trust but a recalculation of the degree to which people are willing to invest in an abstract authority. This reflects the position of Margaret Levi and Russell Hardin, who argue that trust is a judgement about alignment. People do not withdraw trust simply because they've become fickle but because they no longer believe institutions are working in their interest.

Some of the remedies for tackling declining trust tend to assume that declining trust is the by-product of misinformation. If people are better informed, the argument goes, they'll come back into alignment with credible institutions. However, there is a danger that an overemphasis on this treats trust as if it were simply a rational response to information.

In reality, there is a strong argument that trust is less about whether people believe a fact and more about whether they feel seen, respected, and recognised by the systems presenting it. Tackling misinformation without addressing the relational and structural conditions of trust risks treating the symptom while ignoring the cause. It seems more likely that rebuilding trust means not just correcting errors but showing people they matter to the systems meant to serve them.

Case Study: The logic of the welfare run

A recent Economist article supports the points about declining trust, describing a phenomenon it calls a 'welfare run', not unlike a bank run, but targeting state provision. The logic is simple: if you don't trust the state can live up to its obligations tomorrow, you try to extract what you can today. It cites a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies which found a third of people in the UK do not believe (or we might say trust) there will be a state pension in 30 years - which suggests a shift in expectation of the state's role. And with this comes a shift in action as people take action to access as many of their entitlements now.

This logic, the article suggests, governs how people engage with all kinds of benefits and entitlements, from asylum claims to backdated pension contributions. They describe how people are now relying less on official channels to navigate these systems and instead turning to horizontal infrastructures of knowledge and support such as TikTok explainers, Reddit threads, Mumsnet forums and WhatsApp groups.

These platforms, The Economist suggests, don't just supplement the state but often outperform it as they offer lived experience, emotional validation, and tactical know-how in a tone that feels 'more human' than the bureaucratic voice of government.

As such, people are not rejecting the state but working around it. In this environment, trust becomes something else: not belief in legitimacy but a form of tactical coordination between peers.

How should governments respond?

All too often, trust is treated as a kind of psychological topping, something that can be restored with better communication or behavioural nudges. However, there is a strong case that trust isn't a separate free-floating psychological dimension but instead emerges from the structure, function, and lived experience of systems. When those systems falter, trust is recalibrated. People align their expectations, behaviours, and beliefs in line with their lived experiences. That means governments can't rely on abstract authority or polished messaging. Trust is no longer something that is a function of how decisions are made, shared, and felt on the ground.

This shift reflects something deeper. Like honour before it, trust may be losing its grip not because society is breaking down but because new logics are taking root — logics that help people navigate uncertainty, assess credibility, and coordinate action in a world where old certainties no longer hold. These emerging forms are less formal and more fluid. But they are doing some of the work trust used to do.

1. Vibes shape perception through tone, emotional resonance, and aesthetic coherence. Policies must not only be right but they have to feel right.

2. Tribes anchor belief within communities, cultures, and digital networks. People trust what aligns with their identity and shared experience.

3. Verification replaces deference with proof. People want receipts and visible processes, not invisible assurances.

To respond effectively, governments must adapt to these new logics shaping public trust. That means speaking in culturally and emotionally attuned ways because legitimacy must be felt, not just explained. It means investing in participation, not as a box-ticking exercise, but allowing people to shape decisions, not just react to them. And it means designing for credibility by showing workings: being radically transparent about processes, trade-offs, and how decisions were made. In a world governed by vibes, tribes, and verification, these aren't communications strategies but instead are core to how authority must now be earned.

This doesn't mean governments are powerless. But it does mean they must govern differently — not by trying to resurrect a lost trust economy, but by learning to operate in a world where trust is no longer the default social logic.

Historian Perry Anderson takes an even wider view, describing our political moment as one of limbo, where existing systems no longer inspire real trust, but remain dominant because nothing has yet taken their place. As he puts it, the current order "lacks credibility but remains unchallenged by a persuasive counter-vision." Institutions endure not through conviction but by default.

This helps explain why we might be at end of an era where trust was once dominant. It is less about communications failure or misinformation but the by-product of ideological drift. Anderson suggests that people feel they are living within systems they no longer believe in but without a clear alternative to move toward.

That's why the task for governments isn't simply to restore trust. It's to address more fundamentally the systems that will shape a new and different future.

Conclusions

As Mark Fisher writes, we are often haunted not by the absence of something but by its fading power. That may be true of trust. Institutions still stand, but their grip is weaker. Trust is less a lived, everyday relation and more a word we invoke, often to paper over the fact that it no longer binds us as it once did.

In this new terrain, governing isn't just about doing the right thing. It's about designing for credibility in systems where trust is no longer assumed. This is why we don't just need better communication or stronger messaging, but we do need a new kind of behavioural science of social logic in which we can see trust and its possible successors more clearly. Some starting points for this could include:

1. Decomposing trust into its constituent parts. We should not treat it as a single variable but unpack its dimensions - goodwill, resilience, rational calculation - and understand how they behave under stress.

2. Interrogating what is replacing it. As trust recedes, other dynamics are doing their work: emotional tone ("vibes"), identity-based belonging ("tribes"), and the demand for visible proof ("verification"). These aren't distractions from trust, they may be its successors. We need to measure and theorise them directly.

3. This shift also demands we rethink how trust is measured. We need measures reflecting the layered and multifaceted nature of the evolving social logic we tacitly rely on.

The challenge, it seems, is not to restore trust as it once was but instead to learn from its decline and recognise what it reveals about legitimacy, authority, and the systems we live within. Its unravelling offers us the chance to ask: if not trust, then what next?