Political Institutions in Search of Trust: An Introduction
(2026) Political institutions in search of trust - Les institutions politiques en quête de confiance — ISBN: [978-90-04-26394-9], accepted/in-press
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- Trust in political institutions has become a key concept for analysing contemporary democracies. It is an essential condition of democratic government, while its erosion is often invoked to explain electoral abstention, the rise of populist movements, the increasing political polarization, or the growing intensity of protest movements. Trust may thus be regarded, to use Pierre Rosanvallon’s terms, as one of those “invisible institutions” upon which social and political systems rest. Without a minimum level of trust, political decisions cannot be accepted and democratic legitimacy weakens. It must be noted that trust’s significance in constitutional law history remains unclear: democratic theories harbour an ambivalent stance toward trust, with distrust as their foundational principle. However, despite the primacy of distrust mechanisms in democracy, these theories assume a modicum of trust as indispensable for democratic constitutionalism's proper operation. Thus, relationships of trust remain essential pillars of this fragile political system. For instance, electoral mandates in representative systems exemplify the citizen-representative trust bond, while even more vividly, political responsibility – the essence of parliamentary systems – embodies trust between Parliament and Government at its core. More recently, trust has also been explicitly identified as a goal of a wide range of institutional reforms and legislative interventions. These include, in particular, measures aimed at enhancing transparency, strengthening integrity and ethical standards, and developing new forms of citizen participation in political decision-making. While trust cannot simply be decreed, such developments illustrate the increasing tendency of legal systems to engage directly with the issue of trust. But what exactly does this notion mean in legal terms? Although trust has been extensively analysed in sociology, political science, and philosophy, its relationship with public law has not, to date, been the subject of a comprehensive legal study. A gap therefore emerges: even as trust is invoked to justify and guide institutional reforms, it remains insufficiently conceptualised in legal terms. For legal scholars, the question is not confined to defining the term. It also involves questioning law’s role and effects: can law produce trust or give it a specific normative meaning? Does it merely organise the institutional conditions under which trust may arise, or even presume its existence? What, ultimately, are the limits of the “juridification” of political trust? These questions highlight the insufficient theorisation of the concept of trust in public law, which needs to be addressed. This is the ambition of the present book, which brings together the proceedings of the international conference Political Institutions in Search of Trust, held in Brussels on 5 and 6 September 2024. The conference concluded a research project conducted by a team of scholars from ULiège, UCLouvain and UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (PDR-FNRS). The current work does not seek to advance a single, unified thesis on a supposed “crisis of trust” that law would be called upon to resolve. Rather, it aims to explore, in a critical and interdisciplinary manner, a set of structuring issues relating to trust in political institutions, bringing together leading Belgian and international scholars – primarily legal scholars – from different legal traditions, in a bilingual French/English volume.
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Bouhon, F., Clarenne, J., El Berhoumi, M., Geron, L., & Romainville, C. (2026). Political Institutions in Search of Trust: An Introduction. In Bouhon, Clarenne, El Berhoumi, Geron, Romainville (ed.), Political institutions in search of trust - Les institutions politiques en quête de confiance. Brill. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/278552