The Private Management of Public Trust: The Changing Nature of Political Protest

This article argues that political stakeholders in national and international political arenas, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and firms in particular, are increasingly investing in 'Public-Attention-Seeking' activities in order to maintain access to scarce public resources in politics. The principal goal of 'Public-Attention-Seeking' is to win the public's favor and trust. As a consequence, public trust is increasingly managed as a private political resource like money and political power. Yet, unlike money and political power, public trust is not tradable (fungible) because it is based on the belief that a particular stakeholder acts in the public interest as opposed to others stakeholders who are assumed to act out of pure self-interest (i.e., interest in gaining money and power). This proposition can help in explaining various new phenomena in contemporary national and international politics, particularly in pluralist societies, such as the success of professional protest, the benefit of non-cooperation in political bargains, the increasing moralization and personalization in politics, as well as increasing costs of political decision-making. We are particularly interested in the effects of such changes in politics on environmental and economic performance, notably, the risk to emanating from an increasing gap between a stakeholders' moral claims in public and their actual (frequently opportunistic) behavior resulting from the necessity to survive in a global competition for public attention.