Electoral Democracy and the Duty to Trust Fellow Citizens

Political Theory Seminar with guest speaker Chiara Destri, University of Milan.

Contemporary democracies are widely described as suffering from distrust and polarisation: citizens are said to distrust their institutions, their politicians, and increasingly one another, while ideological opponents come to be seen less as fellow citizens than as misinformed or malevolent actors. When this diagnosis is coupled with long-standing research on voter ignorance, motivated reasoning, and rational irrationality, some political theorists conclude that confidence in electoral democracy is misplaced, recommending either restrictions of the franchise or the replacement of elections with alternative institutions such as randomly selected minipublics.

This paper defends a different — attitudinal, rather than institutional — response: democratic citizens have a pro tanto duty to trust one another as voters. Following Forst's (2022) four-place formulation — "A trusts B in context C with valued thing D" — the claim is that each citizen should trust their fellow citizens, in the context of elections, with the responsible exercise of their voting rights. The trust at stake is political rather than social, horizontal rather than vertical, and generalised rather than interpersonal: it concerns citizens' standing as equal participants in a shared decision-making practice, not their relations to office-holders or to particular known individuals.

Since this claim may initially appear implausible, I refine it through three qualifications. First, I distinguish cognitive from affective trust and defend a conception of trust as an affective attitude of optimism — one we may not be able to adopt at will, but can learn to cultivate. Second, I endorse a commitment-based model of trustworthiness: what trust targets is not aligned interests or moralised goodwill, but publicly accountable commitments, which allows trust to extend across political disagreement. Third, I specify the minimal content of this commitment in democratic elections, understood as simultaneously cooperative and competitive practices: trustworthy voters are those committed to respecting the rules of the game and remaining responsive to reasons — a threshold standard that stops short of epistocratic ideals of good voting.

Finally, I offer four justifications for treating such trust as a moral default. Three are instrumental: trust can be therapeutic, helping fellow citizens develop the very dispositions it presupposes; it can harness citizens' trust-responsiveness, in line with Pettit's "cunning of trust"; and horizontal trust among citizens is part of the social infrastructure needed to sustain collective vigilance over public officials. The fourth is non-instrumental: a default of civic trust is a form of respect owed to fellow citizens as equal co-rulers entrusted with political power. The resulting duty is defeasible rather than blind — it need not survive decisive evidence of rule-rejection — but it does require that distrust not become the baseline of political relations among equals, even amidst deep disagreement and institutional strain.

For further information about the Political Theory Seminars and to receive the paper in advance, please contact Christian Rostbøll,