No. 10 | „Trust and Spectatorship“ by Vinzenz Hediger
Research on trust and media in communication measures the trustworthiness of legacy news media (newspapers, radio, television) in nation state settings in longitudinal studies, in which controls for demographics are usually limited to age and political preference. These studies assume that trust in news sources is a useful indicator of the viability of liberal democracy.
No. 9 | „Should Citizens Trust their Randomly Selected Peers?“ by Aliénor Ballangé
This essay presents a critical examination of trust in the context of minipublics (DMPs), with the aim of substantiating the notion of contingent trust and making recommendations for its formalization. Filling a gap in the literature on minipublics, it argues that proponents of DMPs have underestimated the conditions for public trust, risking a potential backlash against democratic innovations.
No. 8 | „Vertrauen als Topos der Plattformregulierung“ von Alexander Peukert
Der Beitrag bietet eine Einführung in das Thema „Vertrauen als Topos der Plattformregulierung“. Dazu wird in einem ersten Schritt das allgemeine Verhältnis zwischen dem sozialen Tatbestand „Vertrauen“ und dem Recht als das einer komplementären, wechselseitigen Wirkungsverstärkung beschrieben.
No. 7 | „Knowledge and Trust. What We Can Learn From the Debates About Epistemic Injustice“ by Regina Schidel
My aim in this paper is to make the debates about epistemic injustice fruitful for an analysis of trust in the knowledge of others. Epistemic trust is understood here in a broad sense: not only as trust in scientific knowledge or expert knowledge, but also as trust in implicit, positioned and experience-based knowledge. Using insights from discussions of epistemic injustice, I argue for three interrelated theses.
No. 6 | „Terrorism and Voting The Rise of Right‐Wing Populism in Germany“ by Guido Friebel, Marius Liebald and Navid Sabet
Can right‐wing terrorism increase support for far‐right populist parties and if so, why? Exploiting quasi‐random variation between successful and failed attacks across German municipalities, we find that successful attacks lead to significant increases in the vote share for the right‐wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in state elections.
No. 5 | „What is political about political trust?“ by Ilaria Cozzaglio
The resurgence of populism and the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic have consolidated an appeal to the language
of trust and distrust in the political arena, but any reference to these notions has often turned into an ideological and
polarized debate. As a result, the possibility of developing an appropriate picture of the conditions for trust in politics has
been undermined.
No. 4 | „The Deconstruction and Reproduction of Mistrust“ by Jonas Wolff
Over the last three decades, countries across the Andean region have moved toward legal recognition of indigenous justice systems. This turn toward legal pluralism, however, has been and continues to be heavily contested. The working paper explores a theoretical perspective that aims at analyzing and making sense of this contentious process by assessing the interplay between conflict and (mis)trust.
No. 3 | „Time and the Growth of Trust under Conditions of Extreme Uncertainty. Illustrations from Peace and Conflict Studies“ by Hanna Pfeifer and Irene Weipert-Fenner
The article studies civil wars and trust dynamics from two perspectives. It looks, first, at rebel governance during ongoing armed conflict and, second, at mass mobilisation against the regime in post-conflict societies. Both contexts are marked by extraordinarily high degrees of uncertainty given continued, or collective memory of, violence and repression.
No. 2 | „The Justification of Trust in Conflict. Conceptual and Normative Groundwork“ by Rainer Forst
This paper challenges widespread assumptions in trust research according to which trust and conflict are opposing terms or where trust is generally seen as a value. Rather, it argues that trust is only valuable if properly justified, and it places such justifications in contexts of social and political conflict.
No. 1 | „Trust in Conflict. Notes on a Research Program“ by Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Vinzenz Hediger, and Tobias Wille
The ConTrust research initiative challenges the conventional wisdom that trust is antithetical to conflict. Instead, ConTrust posits that under certain social and institutional conditions, trust can also emerge in and through conflict. To lay the groundwork for this agenda, this working paper develops a basic concept of trust that is the foundation for more specific conceptions of trust.