The relevance of political trust

This dramatic change in issue salience altered the policy preferences that political trust shaped for a time. The population is now “owed” procurement legislation, crime plans, sustainable employment, rural development, residential land and housing, arable lands, and the East must meet the West.

What is trust? Trust can include both emotional and cognitive dimensions in order to function as a deep assumption underwriting social order. Familiar examples such as lying, family exchange, monetary attitudes, and litigation illustrate the centrality of trust as a sociological reality.

However, the overwhelming mandate given to the PP Government in 2010, or the trust placed in it, can be described as the ratio of people’s evaluation of government performance relative to their normative expectations of how government ought to perform. This definition fits well if changes in trust are a function of changes in perceived performance on important issues such as the economy and the incidence of scandals, although some long-term factors like social trust influence political trust.

Since the actual strategy of government is not entirely understood outside of Cabinet, trust provides a simple decision-making tool. If someone trusts government, its policies and procedures, it follows that they will be more likely to support more government involvement, otherwise, less. The need for trust becomes important, especially when people are asked to make sacrifices for projects and programmes from which they have no perceived benefit. They would then trust government to produce societal benefits and not plunder and pilfer the nation’s resources.

Public sentiment about government sometimes leaves much to be desired. Rather than focusing on the benefits and protections obtained, the government is viewed more as producing scandal, waste, and unacceptable intrusions on people’s personal lives. Trust in governments has altogether declined over the past few decades in TT; hence, for some, the search continues. Since political trust is an orientation towards an entire government, it likely affects assessments of its component parts, namely incumbents and institutions, both political and apolitical institutions as of late. The implications of such simultaneous relationships are problematic for governance.

If trust is relatively low, as it is at present with government overall, then incumbent approval will also be lower than if trust were moderate or high, other things being equal. This, in turn, will undermine the government’s ability to solve problems, further diminishing political trust and incumbent approval. While decisive leadership and economic success have occasionally increased this trust, such changes proved to be momentary. Without an exogenous change that would provide for a sustainable increase in trust or approval, trust will remain relatively low for the PP Government over the next few months. We may witness the consequences of this loss in high levels of public support for measures that would radically alter institutional arrangements, such as re-assigning responsibilities, introducing new faces in government and challengers to the system, term limits, constitutional reform, and balanced budgeting.

Rather than simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with individual political leaders, senators, Members of Parliament, and appointees to state boards, declining trust is a powerful cause of dissatisfaction with government overall. Low trust helps to create a political environment in which it is more difficult to succeed. In this regard, the Prime Minister now holds a trump card, having seen a significant increase in personal rating, over and above her Government. What, then, is the prisoner’s dilemma? How will the game be played? Will the deck be touched? The coming months will reveal her acumen and affinity for national conversation, visibility and transparency, decisive and effective leadership as well as political strategy overall.

Omardath Maharaj

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