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Governing in a trust deficit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Michael David Peters
Michael David Peters*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales – School of Social Sciences, C-20 Morven Brown Building, Room G1 University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia
*
Corresponding author: Michael David Peters, e-mail: peters.michaeldavid@gmail.com
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Abstract

A key component in the exchange relationship between government and business in modern liberal democracies is the level of public trust that each institution enjoys. However, trust does not affect both equally. A fall in trust for government is likely to diminish a government's policy discretion much more than an equivalent fall in trust for business will diminish a business actor's capacity to make profit or shape public policy. In addition, there are good reasons to believe that government will tend to find it more difficult than business to maintain trust from its stakeholders, or to recover it when lost. In this paper, I insert a role for public trust dynamics into Lindblom's theory of the structural power of business. I then return to the debate in this journal on business power and the 2010 Australian mining tax I show that the existing accounts omit the role of trust in the conflict and as a result “discover” much more incompetence from the Australian government than really existed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , October 2016 , pp. 199 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 

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