INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1, I argued that trust and cooperation are central to our understanding as political scientists of how political and economic systems work. Nonetheless, the sources of trust and cooperation are very poorly understood. The study of institutions is now at the core of our discipline, yet we know little to nothing about the relationship between institutions and the richer forms of shared expectations that we commonly group together under the rubric of trust. When do institutions produce, or support, trust? When do they produce or perpetuate distrust? Or do institutions, trust, and distrust have any relationship at all?

We do not have good answers to these questions, in large part because of underlying theoretical confusion as to what trust and cooperation (and, indeed, institutions) consist of. Our major explanations of trust and cooperation tend variously to leave institutions out, to reduce trust to a mechanistic product of institutions, or to claim that there is a two-way relationship between institutions and trust without really explaining how this relationship works. As a result, while there is a substantial body of empirical literature which claims that institutions affect trust, we know next to nothing about the specific mechanisms through which one or another set of institutions might have one or another consequence for the ways in which individuals trust each other.

In this book, I have sought to provide an account that will bridge the gap between institutions and trust by showing how institutions may provide a basis for quite complex forms of trust and cooperation.