To see the decline in faith in government as a result of, in a sense, the decline of citizens is to treat it as a problem of trusting when it should more cogently be seen as a problem of trustworthiness. The differences in what we must explain in these very different visions of the problem are categorical. We would need data on psychological dispositions toward trust and an account of how these work for the Putnam thesis. On the other hand, we would need data on evidence people have to trust or not trust government officials—or to have or not have faith in them—for the thesis that trust is primarily dependent on trustworthiness.

XREF: Contrasts with Robert Putnam's thesis on declining social trust/civic engagement, framing trust as a matter of citizen dispositions rather than institutional performance.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 746