Why Trust Needs a 2025 Repair Job

By: Tenzin Liddy-Corlett, PhD candidate at La Trobe University.

Trust matters in a democracy. Without it, governments and political leaders struggle to deliver policies that can bring real benefits to voters.

The 2025 federal election has offered Australian politicians a unique opportunity to reverse a decline in trust in both them and the democratic institutions on which they rely.

To grasp that chance over the next few years, they need to prove they’re capable of delivering real solutions to the challenges of the 21st century.

Politicians and other policymakers also need to look at the factors driving that loss of faith.

Despite efforts to address declining political trust across the globe, public confidence continues to suffer, partly because of a perceived lack of government responsiveness, competence, benevolence and accountability — four areas that shape perceptions of trustworthiness.

But even when politicians do propose new policies, widespread misinformation often makes it difficult for citizens to understand or evaluate any changes to the extent that they might support them.

The public support necessary for policy implementation can also be undercut further by the spread of false and misleading information from political elites focussed on delivering partisan political objectives instead of genuine community benefits.

The loss of faith in political leaders and democratic institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic — which intensified opposition to critical initiatives like vaccine mandates and lockdowns designed to protect community health — shows what can happen when trust is lost.

In Australia, delivering effective policies in critical areas such as housing, childcare, cost of living and energy could help rebuild some of that trust by showing voters that democracy can respond to their broader needs.

Why trust matters

In 2018, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres argued that public trust in democratic institutions was at “breaking point”.

Political trust has deteriorated in Australia since 2013, and in the US — the world’s most powerful democracy — trust has declined steadily for more than 50 years.

Yet such long-term trends can hide the seriousness of the problem, downplay the role of contemporary political, economic and technological drivers and may even obscure the opportunities for immediate solutions.

Democracies require minimum levels of trust and political leaders need public confidence and support to deliver programs that address the pressing issues of the day.

This is especially important in Australia, where the impacts of complex and contested global problems like climate change are felt intimately through frequent and more intense cyclones, floods, droughts and bushfires.

Many researchers rightly point out that politicians do not deserve full and unconditional trust given the opportunities that such positions of power provide for corruption.

Indeed, democracies are founded on the institutionalisation of distrust. Elections empower citizens to place their confidence in a political representative to pursue their interests.

However, if politicians breach that confidence through unresponsive policy, incompetence or other failures, voters can — in theory — hold them to account by removing or replacing them.

The institutions

Exceedingly low trust in democratic institutions can also be harmful.

During the COVID pandemic widespread mistrust of government-led efforts to restrict the spread of the virus meant that many citizens refused to obey stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates, prolonging and worsening the life-threatening impacts of the pandemic.

The lack of trust in democratic institutions reared up about a year into the pandemic, when false claims that the 2020 US Presidential election was stolen, rigged, or fraudulent — the ‘Big Lie’ — coalesced around a deadly attempt to prevent the certification of the results at the US Capitol.

Yet the low and declining public confidence in democratic institutions may not be the most concerning aspect of such crises of trust.

Researchers have shown that many of the public ‘trust’ judgements that underpinned the ‘Big Lie’ or those made by supporters of anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine movements during the pandemic were grounded in inadequate or poor quality information.

Indeed, many of the most salient claims made by the leaders of both the Big Lie and the anti-vaccine movement were demonstrably untrue. These included false allegations that large numbers of people voted illegally, that COVID was no worse than the flu and that harmful products like bleach could be effective treatments.

Repairing trust

Some scholars and policymakers have attempted to address the information circulating in the media which underpins citizens’ judgments of whether they can trust political leaders and institutions, rather than the issue of trust itself.

At its best, the media has the potential to empower citizens with the information they need to pursue their interests and aspirations, as well as ensuring those who wield power are responsive and accountable.

However, the contemporary media environment is hampered by misinformation circulating online at an unprecedented speed and scale. The rise of generative artificial intelligence makes false and misleading information even harder to detect.

During tightly-contested election campaigns, political groups can use these modern techniques to tarnish competitors and spruik their own policy platforms. It is no surprise people widely mistrust information circulating in this environment.

Many efforts to reduce the level of mistrust in information aim to boost people’s ability to discern truth — often through media and digital literacy programs — and by inoculating people against common forms of false information.

Examples of these interventions include the Cranky Uncle and Bad News games. Cranky Uncle attempts to develop literacy and resilience around climate-focussed misinformation, while Bad News works to inoculate individuals against false and misleading stories by showing common strategies used by those who spread misinformation.

Drivers of mistrust

Interventions like Bad News mainly target young people and overlook older cohorts that are the least experienced with digital media, most likely to be targeted with misinformation, the most trusting and, therefore, potentially the most vulnerable to misinformation.

Trustworthiness assessments are also not always rational, and recent studies have shown that political mistrust and belief in misinformation is often driven by ideological and identity-based ‘defense motivations’ instead of a misunderstanding of facts.

For example, some individuals will continue to trust false or misleading narratives if they align with their political preferences, even when provided with factual, contradictory information and especially if the correction challenges a person’s view of the world.

More effective responses to misinformation and mistrust need to be more sensitive to the potential for identity defence motivations to overpower rational thinking.

However, attempts to enhance individuals’ ability to discern truth also overlook the possibility that declining or low confidence in democratic institutions reflects the poor performance of government or politicians, and don’t respond to systemic factors.

Widening political and economic inequality, for example, boosts the appeal and reach of misinformation and sows distrust in democratic institutions.

Unless politicians can show systematic improvement in their ability to meet public expectations of trustworthiness, interventions that work at the individual level may only have a marginal impact.

And that could undermine the capacity of our democracy to address the most pressing issues of our time.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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