Declining governmental trust is a trustworthiness problem, not a trust problem

Evidence

To see the decline in faith in government as a result of, in a sense, the decline of citizens is to treat it as a problem of trusting when it should more cogently be seen as a problem of trustworthiness. The differences in what we must explain in these very different visions of the problem are categorical. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 746

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the conceptual boundary between trust-as-disposition versus trust-as-evidence-based-assessment of trustworthiness — the central distinction of the book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The categorical difference in what must be explained (psychological dispositions vs. citizens’ evidence) is a paradigm-level reframing of the entire trust-decline debate.
• XREF: connects to: Trust in government collapsed from 1966 to 1992 — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining…, 24