Most citizens hold inductive expectations about government rather than grounded trust

Evidence

Of a large part of the population perhaps we can claim no more than that they have inductive expectations about government, not that they have grounds for trust as encapsulated interest or as grounded in the moral commitments of government agents. That an agency or its role holders are trustworthy might matter to some people, but to most there is nothing beyond expectations. People who merely have inductive expectations cannot be said to trust government in any but the trivial vernacular sense that they “trust” the world to continue more or less as it is. Inductive expectations that government will be capricious might be sufficient to ground distrust, but for most people there might be neither trust nor distrust of a reliable government or agency. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 724

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Hardin’s encapsulated-interest theory of trust to the government scale, contrasting with Luhmann’s familiarity/trust distinction and the reader’s blindness-reading of monitoring collapse.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial distinction between inductive expectations and genuine trust, which is central to Hardin’s overall framework.