Trust in institutions is considered an important, though often not centrally valued, category in democratic societies. In times of increasing social polarization, the thesis that this could also be accompanied by a loss of trust appears increasingly plausible. At the same time, however, empirical data suggest that trust is by no means simply disappearing. Rather, it seems to be distributed and allocated differently. In this lecture, we will look at different concepts of trust in institutions and examine their significance for democracy, civil society, and the rule of law from both a descriptive and a normative perspective. The guiding observation will be that mistrust has increasingly become a central feature of political systems, with the result that political debates are increasingly less about the contending of facts and more about demonstrating which community one belongs to.

Matthias Braun is a Professor of Ethics at the University of Bonn and a Research Associate at the University of Oxford. In 2022 he has been awarded with an ERC Starting Grant and in 2023 with a Falling Walls Award (Social Science and Humanities). Matthias Braun’s research focuses on questions of political ethics, ethical and governance-related challenges of new technologies, as well as questions of justice and solidarity.