Title: Trust Your Compatriots, but Count Your Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy
Author(s): Patti Tamara Lenard ?
Journal: Political Studies 56(2): 312-332.

Move	Introduction 1: Full text
Move 1: Establish A Territory	Trust is central to human relations of all kinds.We trust our parents, our friends, our teachers, and so on. We even trust people more generally, people we have never met, as we go about our daily lives. We trust our doctor to prescribe the right medications. We trust people on the street to provide us with accurate directions when we are lost. We trust our teachers to let us know when we are doing well or poorly in school. The reasons, moreover, that we extend trust to others appear to be as wide-ranging as the situations in which we decide to trust. We trust people because our intuition tells us they are trustworthy; we think of our intuition as guiding us, for example, when we ask a stranger to watch our luggage when we use the washroom in the train station. 10. We trust experts because they have credentials we recognise; health and legal professionals often post their diplomas where patients and clients can see them, so as to give them information on which they can base their trust. We trust others because we have something important in common; members of ethnocultural groups often extend trust to each other more easily than they do to outsiders. In these situations, trust is an element of human relations – trust is something that one person extends to and receives from another – which contains both attitudinal and behavioural elements. A trusting person will do something and with a particular attitude, namely, a willingness to put herself in vulnerability with respect to another person (Baier, 1986, pp. 234–40). When we trust someone, we become vulnerable to the possibility of disappointment or betrayal. Because we cannot know whether a person who is trusted will fulfil this trust (O'Neill, 2002b, p. 6) – the risk of disappointment is inherent in the concept of trust (Warren, 1999a, p. 311). Trust, as described in this way, is clearly a part of our everyday lives.
Move 2: Establish A Niche	It may be less clear, however, whether there is a role for trust in democratic politics. In this article, I argue that trust is central to democracy and that arguments that make distrust the central element of democracy fail. I argue that alongside trust we need to adopt a kind of vigilance, an attitude that is motivated by mistrust, in order to maintain a healthy democracy.
Move 3: Present the Present Work	In the first section of the article, I argue for the centrality of trust to democratic institutions and to political participation. Next, I refute arguments that make distrust central to democracy. Distrust refers to a suspicious or cynical attitude towards others and I will argue that it is inimical to democracy. When democracies are characterised by distrust, in other words, we have good reason to worry about their stability.I then turn to a concept that is closely aligned with but not identical to distrust: mistrust. Mistrust refers to a cautious attitude towards others; a mistrustful person will approach interactions with others with a careful and questioning mindset. The concept of vigilance is motivated by an attitude of mistrust while simultaneously demanding the existence of widespread trust relations. In this way, therefore, democracies require widespread trust relations in order to be effective.