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Sunday, February 19, 2017

Trust and governance

What happens when people no longer trust the government?
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Does a government require the trust of its people? To some extent all systems are predicated on some form of trust in order to work. We trust that the EPF will disburse our retirement savings when we get too old to work. We trust that licensed restaurants are hygienic enough to assure that we don’t get sick from the food they serve. We trust that the pieces of paper we keep in our wallet are worth the monetary values printed on them.
So what is the weight that trust holds for the government?
A recent Edelman Malaysia survey found that only 37% of the people polled trusted the government, down 2% from the trust level reported last year. Astonishingly enough, even US President Donald Trump has higher approval ratings.
If we go by democratic logic, low trust ratings should translate into lower voter turnouts and harder fought political victories. However, through a tradition of gerrymandering, this factor can be mitigated by having politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around.
Nevertheless, trust in the establishment is essential for the day to day running of the government. Economic factors play a large part in this. A skittish population is generally bad for the economy. Growth may be stunted as the people attempt to save money for a rainy day out of wariness over government initiatives. This is assuming that the people have enough money to save in the first place, which by and large sounds like an impossibility in an age where salaries have been stagnant for decades while prices have skyrocketed.
A population with no disposable income and no imaginable prospects for financial advancement will rail against what they see as a failed system and a broken promise, and as tolls rate and fuel prices rise and all manner of goods and services become ever more expensive, trust will eventually become a premium for the government.
Because gerrymandering renders voting an ineffective method of affecting change in the government’s policies, voter turnouts will eventually begin to erode as the people lose faith in the concept of democracy itself.
This erosion of trust in the democratic system is already an observable phenomenon. The Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney found in a poll that only 42% of Australian millenials find democracy “the most preferable form of government”, and a major political narrative discussed far too little in the recent US presidential election was the clash between a resurgent socialist worldview and an autocratic one. Democrat Hillary Clinton became the scapegoat of “the system”, a representative of democracy gone wrong via corporate interests.
Should trust in the government fall to untenable levels, people will inevitably conclude that democracy caters only to the wants of the elite.
The trust in the system will fall even further if voters do not perceive a considerable difference in the policies of competing parties. This is a challenge Pakatan Harapan faces in the next election. Some are speculating the emergence of a “BN 2.0” arrangement should the opposition coalition come into power.
Scott Ng is an FMT columnist

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