Philosophy and Political Trust

We are still some distance from establishing dialogue between philosophers and other political trust researchers as the norm rather than the exception. With the hope of making a small step in the direction of normalising such a dialogue, the purpose of this chapter is to introduce recent work on the philosophy of trust to social scientists working on political trust, and to reflect on how live philosophical debates on trust might be most pertinent to trust’s empirical study. The chapter outlines recent work in the philosophy of trust, expands on the philosophical issues most relevant to empirical study of political trust, and suggests some questions for further interdisciplinary research on political trust.