Trust and Rule

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Trust and Rule asks and answers how and with what consequences members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes. Since different forms of integration between trust networks produce authoritarian, theocratic, and democratic regimes, the book provides an essential background to the explanation of democratization and de-democratization.

Charles Tilly is currently the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He has also taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, and the New School for Social Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences. Charles Tilly is the author of numerous books, including three recently published by Cambridge University Press: Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000; Dynamics of Contention (with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow); and The Politics of Collective Violence.

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Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

General Editor
Margaret Levi  University of Washington, Seattle

Assistant General Editor
Stephen Hanson  University of Washington, Seattle

Associate Editors

Robert H. Bates  Harvard University
Peter Hall  Harvard University
Peter Lange  Duke University
Helen Milner  Columbia University
Frances Rosenbluth  Yale University
Susan Stokes  University of Chicago
Sidney Tarrow  Cornell University

Other Books in the Series

Lisa Baldez, Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile
Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980: The Class Cleavage
Mark Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State
Nancy Bermeo, ed., Unemployment in the New Europe
Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution
Carles Boix, Political Parties, Growth, and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy
Catherine Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930–1985
Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Change
Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective
Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa

Continued after the index

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Trust and Rule

CHARLES TILLY
Columbia University

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521855259

© Charles Tilly 2005

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tilly, Charles.
Trust and rule / Charles Tilly.
p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in comparative politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-85525-X (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-521-67135-3
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social networks. 2. Trust. 3. Democratization. I. Title. II. Series.
HM741.T55    2005
302.4–dc22    2005006329

ISBN-13 978-0-521-85525-9 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-85525-X hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-67135-4 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-67135-3 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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to Harrison White
a hedgehog who became a fox

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Contents

Preface			page  xi
1		RELATIONS OF TRUST AND DISTRUST	1
2		HOW AND WHY TRUST NETWORKS WORK	30
3		TRANSFORMATIONS OF TRUST NETWORKS	52
4		TRUST NETWORKS VERSUS PREDATORS	79
5		FROM SEGREGATION TO INTEGRATION	100
6		TRUST AND DEMOCRATIZATION	125
7		FUTURE TRUST NETWORKS	151
References			163
Index			187

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Preface

Blame Doug McAdam and Sid Tarrow. It all started in 1995, before an astonished Amsterdam audience. With Ron Aminzade, Doug and Sid plotted and executed a visually vibrant parody of my work: they dressed as sans-culottes and gave a rap performance. For two years before the Amsterdam spectacular, McAdam and Tarrow had been grousing together about the poor connections between studies of social movements and analyses dealing with other sorts of popular politics. They thought, for example, that my own work on revolutions, state transformations, contentious repertoires, and popular mobilization articulated badly with current analyses of social movements.

   At the Amsterdam meeting, McAdam, Tarrow, and I made peace by agreeing to work together on new approaches to contentious politics, with the particular hope of coming up with ideas that would span multiple varieties of mobilization and contention. Through Bob Scott’s initiative and Harriet Zuckerman’s patronage, the Mellon Foundation awarded the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences a capacious three-year Sawyer Seminar grant for workshops, fellowships, and sojourns at the Center. The group eventually included fifteen graduate students, seven faculty members, and a great many more temporary participants.¹

   As Sid, Doug, and I were warming up for a year of intense work together at the Center, we wrote a few programmatic papers. We presented one of them to the 1997 meeting of the American Sociological Association as “Democracy, Undemocracy, and Contention.” Still happily unpublished and forgotten, that paper pasted together disparate ideas from the three of us concerning the emergence of social movements, their relations to different sorts of regimes (especially democratic and undemocratic regimes), transformations of social movements during democratization, and how to think about contentious politics at large. Reread seven years later, it marks how far we had to go.

   One road we had to travel led to clearer ideas concerning how the forms of contentious politics interacted with the character of political regimes. Although we shifted the division of labor constantly, on the whole I took more responsibility in our trio for work on regimes and democratization. It is a measure of my meager influence over Doug and Sid that almost all discussion of regimes disappeared from our major joint production, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge University Press, 2001). But the book did contain a comparison of democratization in Switzerland and Mexico. That comparison stressed two processes: insulation of public politics from categorical inequality and integration of trust networks into public politics.

   As I reviewed what other scholars were saying about trust, two recurrent features of the literature struck me as inadequate, at least for the purpose of explaining democratization and de-democratization. First, almost everyone portrayed trust as an attitude, an individual orientation that had somehow to include popular trust of governments and political leaders if democracy were to solidify. Second, most analysts treated the attitude as ranging from narrow to broad, with narrowness the enemy of democracy. The two features combined in the supposition that democratization depended on formation of a broadly trusting public.

   I thought the analysts were on to something, but had not correctly identified the social processes involved. As I saw it:

   • trust was a property of interpersonal relations in which people took risks of each other’s failure or betrayal

   • the same people could simultaneously maintain relations with different others ranging from deep suspicion to confident trust

   • the same was likely to be true of relations to fellow citizens, political leaders, or governmental agents

   • hence the problem for any explanation of democratization and de-democratization was to specify how relatively trusting relations extended into public politics.

Since far outside of democratic regimes a wide variety of risky, long-term collective activities – procreation, cohabitation, provision for children, collaboration in agriculture, long-distance trade, maintenance of ritual solidarities, and more – clearly involved extensive relations of trust, it seemed to me that the mystery concerned how nonpolitical networks of trusting relations politicized themselves, connected with political networks, or gave way to politically connected networks.

   Confident that someone somewhere must have dealt with that mystery, I read widely, pestered my friends, and eventually posted a series of queries on my electronic mailing list. The posting generated an energetic, wide-ranging discussion by e-mail.² Responses confirmed that many people in my circle found trusting relations important but mystifying, that most considered trust to be an attitude rather than a relation, that a number of partial accounts of its causes and effects were competing for recognition, that no one in the circle had formulated a coherent account of transformations in trust networks or changes in their relations to public politics, but that a wide variety of historical studies bore indirectly on those questions.

   As my search proceeded, it became more urgent. I was soon writing the book that became Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). In that book, an account of trust networks and democratization figured prominently. The account refined, corrected, and expanded my contribution to Dynamics of Contention. As the book took shape, however, I realized that both my story concerning exactly how connections between trust networks and public politics change and my evidence concerning those changes remained perilously thin. But I also realized that to expand the account and add new evidence would make an already complex book unwieldy. I reluctantly set aside the task for another day. The day has now come. This book is the result and for you, my readers, to judge how well it meets its challenge.

   From very different angles, four scholars who were doing immediately relevant work gave me the immense favor of commenting on some or all of the manuscript as I wrote it. Alena Ledeneva helped me incorporate ideas and evidence on interpersonal networks and trust in Russia. In her dual roles as expert on trust and general editor of the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series, Margaret Levi made me clarify obscurity after obscurity. Reynaldo Ortega took time away from his own inquiry into Spanish and Mexican democratization to scrutinize and correct what I had to say about those two crucial experiences. Viviana Zelizer forcefully drew my attention to parallels between the political processes I was studying and the economic processes she has made her own. Jennifer Carey combed the text with perceptive care. Audiences at the Russell Sage Foundation (where a new roast by Sid Tarrow, disguised as an introduction, mercifully broke down in PowerPoint failure) and the University of Michigan taught me what was and wasn’t comprehensible or credible in my arguments.

   With permission, I have adapted some material from my “Political Identities in Changing Polities,” Social Research 70 (2003), 1301–1315; “Trust and Rule,” Theory and Society 33 (2004), 1–30; and Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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Other Books in the Series (continued from page iii)

Valerie Bunce, Leaving Socialism and Leaving the State: The End of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia
Daniele Caramani, The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Europe
Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Headcounts in India
Ruth Berins Collier, Paths toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America
Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State
Gerald Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity
Robert F. Franzese, Macroeconomic Policies of Developed Democracies
Roberto Franzosi, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy
Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy
Miriam Golden, Heroic Defeats: The Politics of Job Loss
Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements
Merilee Serrill Grindle, Changing the State
Anna Gryzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe
Frances Hagopian, Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil
Gretchen Helmke, Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina
Yoshiko Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism
J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, eds., Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions
John D. Huber and Charles R. Shipan, Deliberate Discretion? The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy
Ellen Immergut, Health Politics: Interests and Institutions in Western Europe
Torben Iversen, Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare
Torben Iversen, Contested Economic Institutions
Torben Iversen, Jonas Pontussen, and David Soskice, eds., Unions, Employers, and Central Banks: Macroeconomic Coordination and Institutional Change in Social Market Economics
Thomas Janoski and Alexander M. Hicks, eds., The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State
Joseph Jupille, Procedural Politics: Issues, Influence, and Institutional Choice in the European Union
David C. Kang, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Capitalism in South Korea and Philippines
Junko Kato, Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State
Robert O. Keohane and Helen B. Milner, eds., Internationalization and Domestic Politics
Herbert Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy
Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John D. Stephens, eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism
Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radek Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems
David Knoke, Franz Urban Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent, and Yutaka Tsujinaka, eds., Comparing Policy Networks
Allan Kornberg and Harold D. Clarke, Citizens and Community: Political Support in a Representative Democracy
Amie Kreppel, The European Parliament and the Supranational Party System
David D. Laitin, Language Repertories and State Construction in Africa
Fabrice E. Lehoucq and Ivan Molina, Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica
Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure
Evan Lieberman, Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa
Pauline Jones Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia
Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements
James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis and the Social Sciences
Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart, eds., Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America
Isabela Mares, The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development
Anthony W. Marx, Making Race, Making Nations: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil
Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Constitute One Another
Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World
Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif, eds., Legislative Politics in Latin America
Layna Mosley, Global Capital and National Governments
Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm, Policy, Office, or Votes?
Maria Victoria Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America
Ton Notermans, Money, Markets, and the State: Social Democratic Economic Policies since 1918
Roger Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in 20th-Century Eastern Europe
Simona Piattoni, ed., Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation
Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment
Marino Regini, Uncertain Boundaries: The Social and Political Construction of European Economies
Lyle Scruggs, Sustaining Abundance: Environmental Performance in Industrial Democracies
Jefferey M. Sellers, Governing from Below: Urban Regions and the Global Economy
Yossi Shain and Juan Linz, eds., Interim Governments and Democratic Transitions
Beverley Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870
Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World
Richard Snyder, Politics after Neoliberalism: Reregulation in Mexico
David Stark and László Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe
Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis
Susan C. Stokes, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America
Susan C. Stokes, ed., Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies
Duane Swank, Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States
Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics
Kathleen Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan
Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside
Elisabeth J. Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador
Elisabeth J. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador
Stephen I. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India