Episode Details

We like to think of trust as one thing: you either have it, or you don't. My guest's research says otherwise. People can trust a regulator and distrust it at the same time. Yannis Papadopoulos is a Professor emeritus of political science at the University of Lausanne and a member of the coordination team of the EU-funded TiGRE project, a nine-country study of trust in regulators. He has also written a book on accountability: how we hold power in check, and what happens when all that checking starts working against us.  We talk about why trust in regulators is holding up better than trust in politics generally, whether expertise really matters for trust, why silence is the worst thing a regulator can do after a scandal, even though it's the most common response, whether mistrust can be healthy, and whether more accountability really means more trust.