How can we trust a political leader? Ethics,institutions,and relational theory

Abstract

That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authentic communication requires genuine commitment, which is conceptually at odds with self-interested reasoning. This article finds that both incentives and genuine commitment are necessary conditions for trustworthiness in speech, but neither is sufficient on its own. The problem is thus how to combine them. Examining the work of Habermas and Bourdieu, this article develops a relational perspective on authentic communication. It suggests that latent institutions can induce trust by making trustworthiness preferable, and still allow speakers to earn citizens’ trust through genuine ethical commitment.

Introduction

Scholars from various subfields of political and social theory have been drawn to the idea of authentic communication, the type of interaction where speakers address listeners with sincerity and truthfulness. While it has long been recognized that such communication contributes to social cooperation and democratic self-rule, it is only recently that this phenomenon has caught the interest of scholars examining citizens’ trust in leaders. Specifically, the works of Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, which have previously inspired distinct literatures on deliberative democracy and discursive domination, respectively, have informed analyses of leaders’ communication in party politics, social movements, and public administrations. Habermas’ work has helped examine the role that shared ethical commitments to sincerity and truthfulness play in leaders’ communication (e.g. Holdo, 2019; O’Mahony, 2010). Scholars have drawn on Bourdieu’s work, on the other hand, to examine the institutional conditions and socialization processes required for leaders in political fields to respect norms of sincerity and truthfulness and earn citizens’ trust (see Fox-Kirk, 2017; Lane, 2007; Swartz, 2013).

Researchers drawing on these works have made important contributions to the understanding of how norms, interests, and beliefs shape political communication, but they have also reinforced, rather than bridged, differences between ethical and institutional perspectives. Important questions that are not answered satisfactorily by either ethics or incentives have thereby been overlooked: how can institutions be designed to help citizens judge whether speakers are sincere and truthful as opposed to using an image of authenticity for tactical purposes? How can citizens acknowledge and respond to leaders’ genuine ethical convictions and at the same time recognize the critical role that institutional incentives and constraints play in shaping leaders’ possibilities to deceive and for holding them accountable? Previous research has correctly treated Habermas’ perspective as a normative theory of authentic communication and Bourdieu’s perspective as a theoretical framework to understand actors’ self-interested reasons to commit to norms of sincerity and truthfulness. However, to explain speakers’ trustworthiness, we need to combine ethics and incentives, which seem conceptually at odds. To earn citizens’ trust, political leaders must acknowledge sincerity and truthfulness to be both right and beneficial. To combine ethics and incentives, this article proposes a relational perspective (see Crossley, 2015; Emirbayer, 1997). Institutions, I argue, can be sufficiently firm to give citizens reasons to trust political speakers that they do not know, but subtle enough to allow speakers to earn their respect by communicating their genuine beliefs and commitments. Habermas’ use of the word ‘latency’ and Bourdieu’s view of how actors internalize normative principles help conceptualize the type of institutions that would support citizens’ judgments of leaders’ trustworthiness in speech. The kind of latent institutions required, I argue, is most likely to result from just the kind of authentic communication that they are meant to regulate.

The next section situates the aim of this article in relation to previous work on political communication inspired by Habermas’ and Bourdieu’s theories and outlines the broader differences between their ethical and institutional perspectives. Following this, the article zooms in on the ways Habermas and Bourdieu describe the relationship between strategic and authentic communication. It discusses Habermas’ notion of having a ‘dual orientation’ and then explores Bourdieu’s account of actors’ ‘interest in disinterestedness’. The next section draws them closer together and discusses what it would mean to adopt a thoroughly relational understanding of trustworthiness in speech. This section argues that latent institutions allow speakers to earn citizens’ trust by being spontaneous and honest, without regard for strategic considerations, as long as their conduct does not contradict shared ethical norms. Finally, the article concludes by connecting this theoretical view to empirical studies of how citizens and leaders overcome problems of trust in political communication.

Two perspectives on authentic communication

I will use the term ‘authentic communication’ to refer to speech in which speakers address others with sincerity and truthfulness. Sincerity is to say what one means, that is, to be open about one’s intentions, beliefs, and feelings (see Bohman and Rehg, 2014). To be truthful is to be concerned with knowing and expressing what is true (Williams, 2010: 20). By authentic communication, I thus mean to refer to speech in which an actor can be trusted not to deceive others of either the actor’s intentions or through claims that the actors know to be untrue or misleading. Various theorists, including Habermas and Bourdieu, have used these or similar terms to discuss how to judge whether an actor is sincere and truthful and the conditions that make an orientation toward authentic communication possible. My focus in this article is on what makes a speaker trustworthy, rather than how theorists ought to conceptualize particular types of speech. The problem with which this article is concerned is thus under which conditions we may reasonably trust a speaker. I discuss this problem from the perspective of political theory, but will connect my argument to empirical research on how people come to trust political leaders’ sincerity and truthfulness toward the end of the article.

Institutional perspectives on political communication focus on how norms, culture, and rules incentivize trustworthiness in political communication (March and Olsen, 1983; Ryfe, 2001; Schmidt, 2010). Citizens and leaders must overcome a trust gap in that, on the one hand, citizens reasonably assume that leaders act in their own interest, while on the other hand, leaders cannot expect citizens to support or follow them unless they prove themselves to be trustworthy to the citizens. Behnke (2007: 15) suggests that the solution lies in using norms as incentives to allow citizens, on the one hand, to monitor leaders and hold them accountable, and leaders, on the other hand, to earn citizens’ trust by signaling their loyalty to the principles they share. Similarly, March and Olsen’s (1983) argument for exploring how “normative orders” that encompass implicit rules, expectations, and obligations treats such norms as a type of incentive that may constrain and enable action. By contrast, scholars approaching this topic from the perspective of ethics argue that an essential part of how people assess others’ trustworthiness in speech is that they appear to us to not be motivated by self-interest but that they are genuinely committed to authentic communication. Bernard Williams writes that we find others to be trustworthy in speech when we recognize that they “think that trustworthy behaviour, such as keeping one’s word, has an intrinsic value, that it is a good thing (many other things being equal) to act as a trustworthy person acts, just because that is the kind of action it is” (Williams, 2010: 90). From this ethical perspective, we should only trust speakers if they appear to us to say what they mean and mean what they say regardless of whether this is in their self-interest.

While scholars approaching political action in other domains have sought to bridge and combine institutional considerations and a focus on subjective ideas and beliefs (e.g. Crossley, 2015; Schmidt, 2010), recent works on authentic political communication inspired by Habermas and Bourdieu have, on the contrary, accentuated the differences between these perspectives. Habermas’ ethical view and Bourdieu’s institutional perspective on communication have thus often been viewed as opposites and as incompatible (Bohman, 1997; Hayward, 2004; Holdo, 2015; Lane, 2007). Focusing on the characteristic claims of these theorists has allowed scholars to discuss the relative merits of different approaches and different ontological assumptions. Mead (2016), for example, finds that the common “mechanistic” interpretation of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (a practical feel for social games acquired through socialization) to be incompatible with the idea of authentic communication, which requires action that is spontaneous and reflective. Olson (2011) argues that Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective is critical for understanding the limits of sincere deliberative exchanges between speakers because it draws attention to the pervasiveness of social power (for similar arguments, see Hayward, 2004; Poupeau, 2001). Meanwhile, Habermas, being associated with the idea that authentic communication only happens where actors are free from structural constraints and self-interested objectives, has been contrasted to a variety of theorists, including Bourdieu, that in different ways help understand how the omnipresence of power relations, discourse, and contingency make his normative ideal appear misguided or at least difficult to achieve (e.g. Olson, 2011). However, this divide, later sections will show, needs to be overcome to provide a satisfactory explanation for how citizens come to trust political speakers. To do this, we must focus on the relationships between Habermas’ ethics and Bourdieu’s structural conditions. I begin my argument in this section by examining, on the one hand, Habermas’ sharp distinction between strategic and communicative action, and on the other hand, Bourdieu’s critique of the idea of authentic communication.

Strategic and communicative action

Habermas’ central claim about authentic communication, or communicative action, is that it, in contrast to instrumental, or strategic, communication, makes deeper and more sustainable forms of cooperation possible. By orienting themselves toward mutual understanding, actors may reach agreements that have deeper legitimacy and kinds of intersubjective knowledge that have not been distorted by actors’ self-interested reasoning (see Habermas, 2000: 22–23; see also Cooke, 1997; Habermas, 1984).

This idea of an ethically oriented type of communication is partly meant to help explain how people may gradually develop relations of trust in spheres where they feel free to explore and engage with others without strategic intentions or considerations. Confidential talk between friends, religious confession, and therapy are examples of communication that would be difficult to sustain if the participants did not trust each other to be sincere and truthful. Likewise, various types of political communication depend on speakers’ ability to convince listeners that they are sincere and truthful in contrast to saying and advocating what fits their interests. This intuitive distinction between talk that is instrumental in achieving specific goals and talk that gets its meaningfulness from its ethical purpose has been regarded necessary for orienting intelligently in political discourse (Holdo, 2019; Markovits, 2010; Williams, 2010). It helps us to recognize, on the one hand, that much political communication is merely strategic and instrumental, but also, on the other hand, that solidarity and sustainable collective action are made possible by communication that we recognize as genuine and that seeks to connect political goals to people’s experiences, feelings, and values. Skilled political leaders rely on authentic communication: in electoral politics, political promises become useless if listeners cannot trust them to be genuine; in social movements, leaders will be ineffective in coordinating collective action if members suspect them of having ulterior motives; and in international politics, negotiators promote their interests more effectively if the other side sees them as trustworthy. In general, authentic communication makes it possible for speakers to reach agreements and initiate collective action without relying either on the audience’s pure self-interest or on coercive force; authentic communication, instead, makes it possible to do so by exploring shared ethical beliefs and valid points of view (Holdo, 2019; O’Mahony, 2010).

Bourdieu and the problem of trust

Bourdieu approaches authentic (or “disinterested”) communication with a perspective that differs significantly from Habermas’ perspective. ¹ In Bourdieu’s work, the idea of collective reasoning oriented toward mutual understanding and concepts such as truth and truthfulness are primarily seen as strategic tools to use in struggles for power (Bourdieu, 1991). As such, they may in principle serve any political objective, including some that Bourdieu himself sympathized with, such as the recognition of marginalized voices and the struggles of intellectuals for a reason-based public sphere (see Swartz, 2013). He radically proposes that communication is always part of struggles between actors that have different interests, based on the structural conditions that give them different social positions and paths to power. However, the emphasis is most often on how communication, including apparently “sincere” communication, facilitates domination. Bourdieu tends to characterize the idea of truthful, sincere communication as being too idealistic and unconcerned with power and interests to be of any practical value (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991). Scholars informed by Bourdieu’s perspective have suggested that the idea of authentic communication may be best understood as a conceptual tool to conceal relations of power and techniques of domination (see Hayward, 2004; Mead, 2016; Olson, 2011).

The most common interpretation of this claim is that Bourdieu intends to say that authentic, non-strategic communication between people is indeed impossible (Bohman, 1997). Bourdieu did repeatedly claim that power interests shape all communication—that “linguistic relations are always relations of symbolic power” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 118) and that “the power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson” (Bourdieu, 1991: 107). However, the claim that actors never address each other without strategic intentions is not more demonstrably true than Habermas’ claim to the contrary. We would need further arguments to accept the rejection of the intuitive distinction between strategic and sincere communication. Moreover, Bourdieu’s claim leaves very little space for people’s reflective capacities, that is, those capacities that make it possible for people to consciously address, build upon, and reinterpret traditions, beliefs, and social institutions. In other words, it renders insignificant aspects of social activity with which the studies of political communication, and moral action more broadly, are concerned (Bohman, 1997).

A different interpretation, however, is that Bourdieu is not primarily concerned with the ontological question of whether people could be genuinely sincere and truthful, as opposed to motivated by strategic interests, but rather with the conditions of trust. If this second interpretation is right, Bourdieu could be agnostic about whether people might spontaneously engage in authentic communication, because the critical claim is that it is safest (whether or not it is correct) to assume that people act as serves their interests. Crossley (2004) argues that Bourdieu’s problem with authentic communication is not that he cannot imagine that speakers could look beyond their own particular interests to consider what could be universal or public concerns, but that he finds it problematic to assume that such communication does not still require an explanation in sociological terms such as interests and incentives (Crossley, 2004: 92). People should not accept the claim that an actor is sincere and truthful unless they have reason to think that the actor has incentives to be sincere and truthful. Otherwise, they are making themselves vulnerable to manipulation and deceit. Applying this argument to cases such as journalists, intellectuals, lawyers, and researchers, Bourdieu writes that they should not be expected “to contribute to the creation of conditions for the institution of the rule of virtue unless the logic of their respective fields guarantees them the profits of the universal which are at the basis of their libido virtutis” (Bourdieu, 1998a: 145). Similarly, Bourdieu argued that actors in the field of politics should only be trusted to put the interests of the broader public above their own immediate interests if this is profitable or necessary to maintain their respectability in the eyes of the public (Swartz, 2013: 76). Thus, in sharp contrast to Habermas, Bourdieu claims that whether or not people could in principle be genuinely sincere and truthful, we should only trust them to be so if they appear to stand to gain from being sincere and truthful.

To claim that authentic communication must be explained in terms of self-interest is different from rejecting the idea of authentic communication altogether. However, this claim would still imply rejecting Habermas’ distinction between strategic and authentic, communicative action. It would mean treating communicative action as a subtype of strategic action. It would thus still appear that Bourdieu, who often defended the idea that public institutions should be designed to serve the purpose of truth and reason (Swartz, 2013), can only accept a type of explanation of authentic communication that would be incompatible with it. If authenticity depended on incentives, then what would distinguish being truthful from other strategically beneficial ways of behaving? If being truthful and sincere were motivated by self-interest too, then what would keep it from being deceptive?

In contrast to the ontological differences that have been the focus of previous scholarship on Habermas and Bourdieu (e.g. Bohman, 1997; Hayward, 2004; Holdo, 2015), ² these questions center on the problem of trust. To trust a speaker we need to know, on the one hand, that the speaker is committed to the intrinsic value of authentic communication, as opposed to merely saying what seems to serve the speakers’ interests. However, personal commitment to the intrinsic value of authentic communication is usually not enough to trust political leaders, who act in contexts shaped by structures of power and incentives. It may often be the case that they have strong ethical commitments to intrinsic values but are forced to set them aside to be effective in the political sphere. Hence, citizens need to know not only about their ethical commitments, but also that institutional incentives and constraints do not encourage them to be deceitful but give them reasons to be honest and genuine. The problem is how to combine these two conditions, which often appear in Habermas’ and Bourdieu’s work as incompatible.

The relations between authentic and strategic communication

To begin solving this problem this section looks closer at how each of these theorists articulates the relationship between authentic and strategic communication. I first focus on Habermas’ claim that people may have a “dual orientation,” that is, an orientation toward both strategic goals and sincerity. I then examine the meaning of Bourdieu’s phrase “to have an interest in disinterestedness.” Both of these expressions appear paradoxical. However, by examining these parts of their theories we see that their differences may often have been exaggerated.

Habermas on having a “dual orientation”

The notion of having a “dual orientation” appears in Habermas’ discussion of the role of social movement leaders in the public sphere (Habermas, 1996: 370). While he defines communicative action as distinct from strategic action and separates public sphere communication from political competition, he also finds that the public sphere cannot exist without strategic political interests. Its ethical commitments to public-minded communication are upheld by actors that benefit from these commitments strategically. The ideas and political objectives they advocate for can be more effectively addressed, understood, and supported in contexts where interactions between speakers and listeners are based on assumptions of sincerity and truthfulness, rather than being only instrumental or appealing purely to actors’ self-interests (Habermas, 1996: 369). Movement leaders, Habermas argues, respect norms of public reason because they cannot sustain their own presence and significant roles in the public sphere without them. Party leaders and other actors in the formal political sphere are also constrained by these norms because they shape their interactions with civil society (Habermas, 1996: ch. 8). Civil society and political leaders seek political influence with their programs, “but at the same time they are also reflexively concerned with revitalizing and enlarging civil society and the public sphere as well as with confirming their own identities and capacities to act” (Habermas, 1996: 370). Thus, these actors maintain the public sphere by not being neither narrowly strategically motivated nor simply public-minded, but simultaneously oriented toward both strategic goals and mutual understanding. But how can authentic communication both require and be incompatible with strategic action? In other words, how can it depend on the support of the kind of action to which Habermas claims it is antithetical? ³

There appear to be two possible answers. The first is that the stimulus required for actors to engage in authentic communication is somehow of a different, perhaps weaker, kind than the incentives and institutions that structure strategic action. Actors may find certain kinds of action meaningful even if they do not gain anything from them. This would mean that they may be stimulated to act truthfully without being provided with incentives. Habermas seems to indicate that this is his view when he rejects the idea that people may engage in authentic communication for self-interested reasons. Structural and institutional conditions, he argues, may play only the passive role of allowing authentic deliberation to occur. Legal rights, for example, may make it difficult to hinder people from communicating in the public sphere. If, by contrast, incentives were to play a more active or productive role, they would, Habermas claims, “distort” or “destroy” authentic communication. Incentives cannot make people behave truthfully and sincerely because when people respond to incentives, they are per definition strategic, not genuinely truthful. As Habermas puts it, truth-oriented action, on the subjective level, can “certainly be stimulated,” but it “cannot be regenerated or propagated as one likes” (Habermas, 1996: 359). To gain citizens’ trust, speakers need to show that their beliefs and commitments come “from within” (ibid.) as opposed to being useful.

This may be a sufficient answer for Habermas’ purposes, but it does not solve the problem of trust as Bourdieu would see it. It fails to explain how, even if truthfulness could in principle be spontaneous, people would be able to rely on speakers’ trustworthiness. The problem with Habermas’ answer, from this perspective, does not concern ontological assumptions about the nature of authentic communication, that is, it is not that sincerity and truthfulness could not come spontaneously or be softly stimulated the way Habermas suggests. The problem, rather, is that even if they could, one would still need reasons to trust speakers not to take advantage of their audience’s faith. This first possible answer does not provide such reasons.

The second possible answer to the question of how strategic and sincere action can be inter-dependent yet incompatible offers a solution. Even if truthfulness required incentives that create an interest in truthfulness, such interests may not necessarily intrude upon and distort the practices of communication that result from them. Habermas would not accept that sincerity may be derived from strategic interests since this would blur the distinction between them, and make the former a subtype of the latter. However, what if institutions provided incentives to engage in authentic communication that still did not interfere with the interactions that took place in that mode of communication? What if, for example, the incentives that brought them into this mode of communication were usually not felt by the interlocutors because they were already sufficiently motivated to be sincere and truthful? If this were the case, would it not mean that authentic communication could be supported by strategic action, and still be genuinely non-strategic? The last section will suggest answers to these questions, but let us first consider how we are led to ask the same type of questions by starting from Bourdieu’s vantage point, focusing on the notion of having an “interest in disinterestedness.”

Bourdieu on the “interest in disinterestedness”

If Habermas’ challenge is to explain how authentic communication can co-exist and depend on strategic action without being distorted by it, Bourdieu’s challenge is, conversely, to make room for authentic communication that is not completely the result of strategic considerations. Bourdieu himself noted how paradoxical it appeared to explain authentic communication within his theoretical framework as “an interest in disinterestedness” (e.g. Bourdieu, 1998a: 112). The paradox resolves itself, however, if we separate the question of whether all communication depends on supportive structures (and objective interests) from the question of whether some communication may not have a strategic intention (and be subjectively disinterested). Bourdieu’s concepts field and habitus allowed him to specify people’s situation-specific objective interests while claiming that their actions will usually be “objectively organized as strategies without being the product of a genuine strategic intention” (Bourdieu, 1990: 62). In fields of science, for example, he found that speakers had strategic reasons to emphasize the importance of values such as truthfulness, objectivity, public interest, and transparency (Bourdieu, 1975, 1998a). ⁴ Such founding principles formed the basis of a scientific field’s credibility and public recognition. More specifically, each field of science rested upon its own claim to legitimacy—what sets it apart from other fields—and to maintain its status the members of the field had to defend its relative autonomy, that is, the field’s own logic of social status and power. Only through a careful analysis of “the social conditions of possibility of these universes” could researchers understand how people could develop an “interest in disinterestedness” or, as Bourdieu notes, something like Habermas’ ideal speech situation (Bourdieu, 2004: 82). In other words, the possibility of authentic communication and the status of the field rested upon actors’ defense of the field’s principles. However, Bourdieu argued that actors in these fields did not experience their actions as strategic, but rather as part of who they were (their habitus). The more these “players” developed a “feel for the game”—that is, the more accustomed they became to the social practices of their respective fields—the less they needed to be reminded of the shared ethical commitments they were trusted to respect. They would internalize objective incentives to such an extent that the distinction between self-interest and personal commitment would become practically irrelevant. Bourdieu’s theory thus offers a way to understand why it appears reasonable to trust speakers who appear personally committed rather than strategically motivated, even if we ultimately allow ourselves to trust them if we know that they stand to lose from being deceitful.

While the concept of habitus helps us understand why people may be objectively oriented toward strategic goals while not intentionally acting to pursue them, it cannot, however, replace genuine ethical commitment as a reason to trust a speaker. Habitus, as conceptualized by Bourdieu, produces routine action, based on structurally determined socialization, rather than reflective action that goes beyond what can be expected on the basis of social background and is open to such sources of influence as the experiences and feelings of others and the validity of their claims (Archer, 2013; Bohman, 1997). ⁵ In political communication, habitus may orient speakers toward sincerity in the sense of being true to themselves. Speakers may thus appear genuine in the sense that they are not consciously seeking to present themselves in beneficial ways, as opposed to “sweet-talking politicians, spin doctors, and outright liars” (Markovits, 2010: 1). Thus, speakers who act on their gut feeling may gain others’ trust because they are not pretending to be someone they are not. For Trilling (1972), authenticity meant refusing any form of conscious representation or display for the sake of being purely oneself. However, this kind of authenticity, concerned one’s truthfulness to one’s self, provides a different and weaker kind of trust than the trust gained by speakers who show themselves to be open to reflection and contestation in dialog with others, including over whether their behavior corresponds to their expressed intentions (see Bohman and Rehg, 2014). Only in the latter case would we trust a speaker to act according to a rationally held belief that we could expect the speaker to be able to describe and justify. “If others are to rely on what you tell them,” writes Williams, “you need, as well as not misleading them about what you believe, to take the trouble to make sure that your belief is true” (Williams, 2010: 149). Citizens rely on political leaders to give them accurate statements about their intentions, which requires, rather than “frank speech,” that they develop their goals through sincere engagement with citizens’ realities and political obstacles. In this regard, habitus does not help understand what makes a speaker trustworthy, even if it is one way of understanding how an actor can have objective interests in actions that do not appear strategic to them but as simply right and appropriate. ⁶ We are thus led to the same question that I raised above about Habermas’ “dual orientation”: could institutions provide incentives that constrain speakers sufficiently, while at the same time allowing them to gain citizens’ trust by showing themselves to be genuinely sincere in their commitments and ideas?

Latent institutions: A relational view

This question cannot be answered by focusing exclusively on either ethics or incentives. Both are necessary conditions, but neither, on its own, provides a solid reason for trusting a speaker. In this last section, I propose a relational perspective (see Crossley, 2015; Dépelteau and Powell, 2013; Emirbayer, 1997) that focuses instead on the relationships between ethics and incentives, and how they are inter-dependent and mutually constitutive. In general terms, a relational perspective focuses on how structures and institutions that objectively shape patterns of social action interact with subjective-level beliefs, traditions, interpretations, and intentions. Applying this perspective to the question of how citizens can trust leaders in political communication, we can see that institutions may, in theory, be sensitive enough to allow speakers to appear sincere and truthful and still steady enough for citizens to trust that they have no interest in deceiving them. ⁷ As I aim to show, this would be possible if institutions provided incentives that were latent features of political communication, to which actors responded spontaneously and without strategic intent.

That incentives may be latent means that they may exist and be known even though they are not actualized under normal circumstances. Because they do not normally have practical importance for actors that spontaneously act in accordance with these incentives, they recede to the background, in the sense that they become part of the unspoken assumptions on which social action is based rather than conscious knowledge. They make themselves felt, however, when actors come close to contradicting the principles the institutions are based on. Such latent incentives can, if they are based on a shared background understanding of how we relate to one another and what expectations are normally met (see Taylor, 2004), have lasting effects even when they are not, in our experience, why we do the things we do. Consider lawyers and judges that devote their working life to the public practice of law. Their careers depend on how they defend and maintain respect for the law. However, if they constantly needed incentives to remind them of how their status depends on their credibility in this regard, they would be quite mediocre in their profession. As Bourdieu would agree, the incentives (e.g. in the form of salaries, legal boundaries, and social prestige) that shape action in the field of lawyers and judges, and impose on them a need to be truthful, exist for those who are not already genuinely committed, who do not follow the principles of the field spontaneously. Similarly, religious leaders usually have incentives to “practice what they preach,” but only mediocre such leaders, who are not deeply committed to the moral rules of their church, would need to be reminded of the consequences of insincerity and hypocrisy. In this way, latent incentives shape the boundaries of action, but also allow speakers to be sincere and truthful by reflective choice, and therefore do not make communication less authentic. ⁸

Consider the added value of the idea of latent institutions in relation to previous arguments made by such scholars as March and Olsen (1983) for exploring the role of norms and normatively informed expectations in social settings. In their argument, “normative orders,” which include duties, obligations, roles, and rules, may often provide better explanations of social behavior than analyses that assume that actors calculate the return expected from alternative choices (p. 744). However, neither Bourdieu nor Habermas would necessarily see such informal institutions as separate from incentives that appeal to actors’ interests. The important distinction is not between formal and informal incentives, since both may push actors to communicate strategically to gain advantages or meet expectations. The difference between latent institutions and institutions that actively shape people’s behavior is that latent institutions allow people the freedom to interact and communicate with a genuine disregard for incentives of any kind while at the same time, through the unspoken knowledge of limits, providing a safe environment that encourages trust. For example, while the existence of skilled investigative journalists and transparency regulations may provide active incentives for politicians to be trustworthy by setting examples, in a well-functioning political sphere, these incentives would soon become latent, if political actors learn to adjust their behavior to a shared background understanding of which behaviors are appropriate and which are not.

The idea of latent institutions helps clarify Habermas’ argument that actors in the public sphere may have a dual orientation. Latent institutions offer a way for people to know that incentives would be actualized and appeal to actors’ strategic interests if speakers’ genuine beliefs and free choice would not suffice to remain sincere and truthful. Thereby, latent institutions provide listeners with reasons to trust a speaker even in the case where they might otherwise have doubted the speakers’ ethical commitment. This argument helps account for the inter-dependence of authentic and strategic communication. Consider Habermas’ discussion, in a slightly different context, of the options that people face when authentic communication fails, that is, the case in which speakers do not gain the trust of listeners (Habermas, 2000: 24). According to Habermas, they would have three options in this scenario. Besides trying to regain listeners’ confidence by searching for common ground, or on the contrary ending the interaction, the speaker may “switch to strategic action,” (ibid), which means speaking as one self-interested actor to another. This could mean, for example, that the speaker points out how institutions provide incentives to be sincere and truthful, which may provide the listener with reasons to accept the speakers’ credibility. However, the risk is that such reference to institutions that provide incentives undermines the actors’ standing as a person committed to the intrinsic value of authentic communication. To avoid this, the incentives would need to be subtle enough to allow listeners to see that the speaker’s sincerity and truthfulness come “from within,” in Habermas’ terms.

Habermas’ use of the term “latency,” in the context of legal institutions, helps to understand how it is possible for incentives to be subtle in this sense. According to Habermas, laws should ideally originate from discussions where their principles are made explicit and justified, but then keep “a hold on the minds of all actors” by functioning “as a kind of latent background knowledge” that is part of their shared lifeworld (Habermas, 1996: 395, my emphasis). Similarly, incentives to be sincere and truthful may become part of actors’ latent background knowledge, and only make their presence felt for those who do not spontaneously act according to these norms. Such latent incentives would allow people to trust others’ commitment to the intrinsic value of authentic communication also in spheres where they need to act strategically. Moreover, if they are the result of discussions where people approached one another sincerely and truthfully, people would be more likely to see such incentives as natural. That is to say, if Habermas is right that authentic communication allows actors to form agreements that are more deeply based on the experiences and beliefs of all actors’ involved, and if Bourdieu is right that actions can be beneficial and still non-strategic in intent if they stem from intuitions formed through socialization, then latent institutions of speech should be best achieved through inclusive, authentic communication.

Latent incentives help articulate a relational perspective that bridges the divide between Habermas’ and Bourdieu’s theories. This relational perspective shows how we can combine ethical commitments and incentives to support the intuitive solution that we can trust speakers who have reason to find it both right and beneficial to be sincere and truthful. Latent institutions guide actions without constantly reminding actors of their strategic reasons to respect shared ethical norms, norms that they would respect also without any apparent strategic reason. Bourdieu’s concept of social field helps explain this. Bourdieu suggests that it is only the actors that are not already sufficiently socialized, who appear to lack “a feel for the game,” that may need to rely on institutional incentives to gain people’s trust. As long as they appear to spontaneously find the principles of social institutions to be justified and natural, they would not seem to need to be reminded of respecting them. However, the institutions play a significant role in providing political leaders with incentives and citizens with reasons to trust them in case they cannot be trusted to adjust to these principles naturally. What is more, the incentives provided by latent institutions can be continuously addressed and modified within processes of authentic communication to make sure that they continue to correspond to the shared ethical commitments of reflective citizens and political leaders. ⁹ In this ideal, incentives and ethical commitment would be mutually supportive and allow citizens to trust more deeply the speech of political actors trying to gain their support and cooperation.

Concluding discussion

A relational perspective on political speech supports the intuitive idea that citizens can trust a speaker to mean what they say if the speaker appears to have reasons to find sincerity both right and beneficial. We know from previous research that speakers’ ethical commitments affect audiences’ receptions (Kapust and Schwarze, 2016; Lupia and McCubbins, 2000). In particular, voters, as well as political candidates themselves, see ethical character as a significant part of a leader’s credibility (Kapust and Schwarze, 2016; see also Holdo, 2019). But citizens also learn to trust a political leader if it appears to them that social and political institutions appeal to leaders’ self-interest by providing incentives to be truthful and sincere (Lupia and McCubbins, 2000). When one of these conditions is weak, the other may compensate. However, both conditions are unstable on their own, without the support from the other. In other words, on the one hand, the ethical argument relies on shared ideas and principles that are unlikely to be sufficient without institutions that help holding actors accountable. On the other hand, trust cannot be gained solely through institutional incentives that appeal to actors’ self-interest either. Trust requires a combination of both.

In the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy sought to reassure voters of his trustworthiness in response to accusations concerning his religious identity and faith. He was able to demonstrate that he had incentives not to let religion affect his judgment in public affairs, but also that such incentives were redundant since his commitment to the separation of church and state, as well as to religious liberty, would have made him trustworthy regardless (Warnick, 1996). This example supports the intuition that citizens find leaders trustworthy if there are institutional guarantees against deceptive or misleading communication and if they find leaders to be genuinely committed. Conversely, leaders who expose weaknesses in democratic institutions or show a lack of personal commitment to trustworthiness, or both, undermine citizens’ trust.

From a democratic theory perspective, the problem is how to construct reliable institutions and still allow space for actors to act on their genuine, personal commitment. This article has provided a conceptual solution to this problem. Institutions of political communication must be firm and at the same time sensitive to speakers’ genuine ethical commitments. This requires latent institutions, which are most likely produced when incentive structures already stem from uncoerced ethical agreements formed through inclusive public deliberation.