Political vagueness substitutes identification for programmatic trustworthiness

Evidence

It may be nearly impossible to avoid endemic distrust in much of politics without simultaneously avoiding clear positions on issues. Perhaps the most striking difference between leaders of many nongovernmental organizations—such as business firms—and elected officials is that the former often must live up to relatively clear expectations while the latter often can attempt to make expectations vague and the judgment of achievements therefore pliable. In politics, it is often a drastic mistake to be specific, because for many issues most people must necessarily have preferences that fall some distance away from any proposed policy. Much of the appeal to voters is therefore directed at their identifications, not at the programs they might like to see implemented. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 769

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors a political-institution variant of the reader’s thesis: where monitoring is impossible (vague policy, distant issues), trust increasingly runs on identification rather than verifiable constraint.