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Populism as the Crisis of Political Trust

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Trust (Trust 2020)

Part of the book series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics ((SAPERE,volume 54))

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Abstract

Populism is an ideal litmus test to interpret the crisis of trust that today seems to affect liberal democracies and their institutions. It is by looking at this crisis that some deep motivations of populism can be understood. However, it is also by analyzing populism as a crisis of political trust that we can understand in which way the “prism of trust” is essential to understand political phenomena. This article shows how populism appears as a crisis of political trust in democracy, in representation, and in authority, and try to develop a theoretical framework about this phenomenon in terms of political theory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I use the concept of Political Trust in the sense of the citizens’ confidence in political institutions and political players. Political trust is a product of political factors and can be considered as a “one-dimensional attitude” (Hooghe 2011); it is something different from, even if strongly interconnected to, social trust (Newton 1999; Bauer and Freitag 2018), which could be indeed a prerequisite for trusting political institutions (Zmerli and Newton 2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pisa, Via P. Paoli 15, 56126, Pisa, Italy

    Antonio Masala

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  1. Antonio Masala
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Correspondence to Antonio Masala .

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  1. Pisa University, Pisa, Italy

    Adriano Fabris

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Masala, A. (2020). Populism as the Crisis of Political Trust. In: Fabris, A. (eds) Trust. Trust 2020. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44018-3_13

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