Keynote at Conference on Political Trust: A Challenge for Democracies

I gave a keynote presentation on “Political Trust and Legitimacy in the Age of Populism” for the Conference on Political Trust organized by CEVIPOF at the French Political Science School, Sciences Po, Paris (December 5-6, 2025). The talk reviewed traditional theorizations of political trust, showed how they connected to theorizations of legitimacy, and then discussed how traditional approaches to both trust and legitimacy have been upended by the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic.

In my talk, I theorize that although political trust is central to theories of democracy and governance, empirical studies often leave it undefined. Legitimacy is often an accompanying term, but the relationship between it and political trust is often under-specified. I review the conceptualizations of both terms and their interrelationships, arguing that the two terms similarly refer to both a somewhat static, foundational acceptance of a governing authority and more dynamic assessments of governing authorities’ activities in terms of policy performance, political responsiveness, and/or procedural quality. I then go on to consider the loss of trust and legitimacy signaled by the rise of populist anti-system politics that have accompanied successive crises and emergency politics, in particular with regard to the 2010s economic crisis and the 2020s Covid-19 pandemic.