In sum, vetting directly restructures the capabilities and competency of public institutions
and puts in place new incentive structures. Whether those new incentive structures will actually
change the interests of the actors or the outcomes is uncertain. But trust is tied to this notion of
uncertainty. One can make changes that render the public institution more objectively
trustworthy, but citizens still need to engage in some sort of transaction with the institution to
ascertain if the institution is in practice worthy of trust. Without citizens taking a risk in the new
public institutions, one will never know if the institutions are trustworthy.
Mishler and Rose’s survey of post-Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe has
demonstrated that “citizens trust or distrust holistically.”
In their analysis they created a
composite of institutional trust because there is such a high degree of commonality of trust
across institutions, and concluded that trying to differentiate levels of trust between public
institutions did not yield any appreciable results.
If citizens trust institutions holistically, that
is, if they transfer trust from one institution to the other as a function of the general
trustworthiness of public institutions, then citizens can also generalize distrust across institutions
as well. This suggests that even if there is only a focused vetting on some but not all public
institutions, this might still have a positive spillover effect on the assessments that citizens make
about other institutions. Citizen trust in public institutions encompasses their greater assessments
of the capacity, interests, and incentives of government in general. Therefore, vetting has the
capacity to strongly impact citizen assessments of the trustworthiness of public institutions
across the board.
91
William Mishler and Richard Rose. “Trust, Distrust, and Skepticism About Institutions of Civil Society.”
Studies in Public Policy, No. 252. Centre for the Study of Public Policy: University of Strathclyde (1995)., p. 29.
The findings of Mishler and Rose are consistent with Sztompka’s work on trust, which demonstrates that people
transfer trust from one domain to another because of imperfect information and information processing limitations,
p. 75-77.
92
Ibid., 21. The study relied on Trust in Political and Civil Institutions numbers from the New Democracies
Barometer III, published by the Paul Lazarsfeld Society, Vienna. The study looks at trust measures from nine
countries across 15 public institutions, ranging from the government and the parliament, to the courts, to the army
and the police.
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Convention