Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them

Actions like the Montgomery Bus Boycott required complex organization and coordination. Protest leaders essentially had to create a parallel public transportation system to ensure that participants in the year-long boycott could get to work and didn’t lose their jobs.

Compliance in democracies depends primarily on two factors: the consistency of the message, and public confidence in the messenger.

Efficacy is always a problem of perception. People will undertake actions, even deeply demanding actions, if they are persuaded their participation can make a difference. The challenge for organizers of social movements is to create a range of actions, from thin to thick, that let participants feel they’re making effective change.

Within a week of the Parkland shooting, it was significantly harder to buy an assault rifle in the United States—and legislators had nothing to do with it.18

in 1978 people got news primarily from local newspapers and television stations, which often reported on the policies and votes made by the congresspeople who represented the area. Today, by contrast, twenty-four-hour cable news and social media focus disproportionately on national politics, whose figures are likely more familiar to many citizens t

The wallet experiment illustrates several key dimensions of trust. We trust particular individuals, groups, and institutions: we might trust our neighbors but not strangers or the police. Trust is situational: I might trust you to return my wallet, but I might not trust you to care for my child. Trust inherently involves risk: if I’m guaranteed to

Books like The New Localism by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak offer examples of how cities are creating economic turnarounds by building partnerships between universities, local organizations, industries, and governments in a way that’s deeply optimistic and promising,

rising death rates in middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans who do not have college degrees, opening a debate about “deaths of despair”—suicide, drug use, and alcoholism—

But once you’ve concluded that government can’t be trusted to do the right thing, you’re less likely to rely on voting as a useful form of civic expression.

When systems won’t respond to attempts at change, that’s the time to look for new tactics.