Person:

Norris, Pippa

The concept of trustworthiness can be understood to involve an informal social contract where principals authorize others to act on their behalf in the expectation that the agent will fulfill their responsibilities, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. When evaluating the trustworthiness of political institutions, public judgments are expected to reflect the quality of government procedures, especially the principles of competency, impartiality and integrity. The most extensive body of cross-national empirical research about these issues has focused largely on established liberal democracies, such as Nordic states, characterized by freedom of the press and media pluralism, as well as affluent post-industrial European societies with highly educated populations. This study theorizes that the accuracy of any public judgments of the trustworthiness of government procedures are likely to be mediated by the information environment in open and closed societies, as well as by the cognitive skills of citizens. To understand these issues, Part I summarizes the theoretical argument. To identify the drivers of trust, data is drawn from around 80 societies around the globe included in Wave 7 of the European Values Survey/ World Values Survey (2017-21). Part II examines individual-level data to analyze how far confidence in political institutions is strengthened by subjective perceptions about the quality of governance. For a more rigorous test, Part III compares objective performance indicators to see how far independent measures of the quality of government by monitoring agencies predict public judgments of the trustworthiness of core political institutions in each country -- and how far such relationships are condition by the type of information society, as well as by societal levels of education. Part IV highlight the key findings and considers their broader implications for understanding the conditions for trust and trustworthiness.

The early twenty-first century has seen growing concern about risks to academic freedom in America and worldwide. To understand these issues, Part I of the paper distinguishes two threats to academic freedom. Restrictions on independent scholarship can arise from outside institutions of higher education, through state laws and external regulatory bodies. They can also be due to internal cultural processes within the academy which limit viewpoint diversity. What is the relationship between these embedded dimensions? The study theorizes that legal regulations can exert a direct effect on academic freedom and also have an indirect chilling effect, through encouraging practices of self-censorship. To address these issues, Part II draws upon the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) Academic Freedom Index (AFI) in 179 nations worldwide. Net change in the Index is estimated since 2000 and it is illustrated by selected cases, including the United States. Part III builds upon this foundation to understand subjective perceptions of self-censorship within academia. Cross-national survey data from over 100 countries is used to examine the attitudes and behavior of scholars within the discipline of political science, a field dealing with issues at the forefront of culture wars in higher education. The conclusion in Part IV summarizes the core findings and considers their broader implications. The evidence suggests that 1) growing limits on academic freedom are associated with broader processes of backsliding in liberal democracy, evident in many parts of the globe. Equally importantly, legal constraints on academic freedom encourage processes of self-censorship, thereby silencing unorthodox voices, suppressing debate, and weakening viewpoint diversity in higher education. Institutions of higher education need to resist pressures on academic freedom to fulfil their classic mission of advancing human knowledge.

There is widespread concern that academic freedom is threatened by growing demands for intellectual conformity and attempted censorship from intolerant zealots involving ‘woke wars’ and a ‘cancel culture’ pitting the socially liberal progressive left against the socially conservative right. This study seeks to understand the nature and scope of contemporary threats to academic freedom of expression around the world, especially the role of self-censorship in this process. Part I unpacks the notion of a ‘cancel culture’ in academia, understood as a chilly climate silencing speech deemed derogatory, hostile, factually incorrect, or morally offensive. The research explores processes of self-censorship where scholars are unwilling to express their authentic views in public. Mechanisms potentially driving these processes include heterodox status (cultural minorities out of step with majority views aka fish-out-of-water); institutions (constitutional principles, legal frameworks and administrative regulations used by educational authorities to govern academic speech); culture (attitudes, values, and social norms towards free speech); and academic status (inequalities in academic power, security, gender, and age). To establish empirical evidence, Part II sets out the research design. It draws upon new survey data collected from the second ECPR-IPSA World of Political Science survey (WPS-2023), monitoring the background and attitudes of almost 2000 political scientists living and working in around 100 countries worldwide. Part III analyzes the key results, confirming the reluctance of heterodox scholars to challenge majority views in controversial debates. The conclusion in Part IV summarizes the findings, considers their broader implications, and discusses the next steps in the research agenda.