Page 363 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS169 Markku L.
of ‘non-users’ – citizens that have a very vague idea of the credibility of
indicators and statistics. For statistical offices, a major objective would
therefore be to turn these potential users into real users, who would gain first-
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hand experience and hence presumably regain their trust in indicators.
Thirdly, while trust has certainly declined in some countries and with
regard to some aspects of political institutions, empirical analysis reveals a
more complex and differentiated picture. When it comes to trust in statistics,
the UK – alongside the US the main concern of Davies – appears in Europe as
an outlier due to the particularly low trust that Britons express in statistics. In
2010, only slightly over 30% of the UK citizens trusted in statistics, as
compared to 70% in Denmark and Sweden, and well below even such low-
trust countries as Greece (56%) and Portugal (52%) (Eurobarometer 2010). In
Finland, the statistics office remains as one of the most trusted institutions in
the country, with lonely very slight decline observed in the past few years
(Melkas 2014). Even in France, dubbed sometimes as a “country of distrust”
(Algan & Cahuc 2007; Algan et al. 2012; Agacinski 2018), citizens express
mistrust towards ‘official statistics’, but when inquired about their trust in
‘public statistics’, give far more positive answers (Desrosières 2015;
Rosanvallon 2017). Jasanoff and Simmet (2017, 752) contest pessimistic
picture even for the UK. A poll from 2016 found that trust in experts had
actually increased between 2014 and 2016, as 85% of the surveyed Britons
wanted politicians to consult professionals and experts when making difficult
decisions.
A final nuance comes from the observation made by Ràfols (2019, 9) about
two simultaneous trends in science, technology and innovation (STI)
indicators: these indicators are increasingly seen and used as a means to foster
STI governance under a New Public Management ethos, while at the same
time there has been an “erosion of the uncritical belief in the benefits of STI”.
The term “uncritical” is the key: unlike Davies, Ràfols does not see the loss of
trust as an exclusively phenomenon, but rather as a healthy move away from
naivety. In the following, I will follow this thread, arguing that rather than
lamenting the loss of citizens’ trust in indicators and experts, we should
perhaps celebrate this loss of innocence, and certainly seek to harness the
perhaps more mature and healthy mistrust to constructive purposes.
Representing – by definition – precisely the kind of reductionism of
complex societal issues into “numerical aggregates” evoked by Davies,
composite indicators appear as a prime candidate for mistrust. I will therefore
address one of the questions listed in the guidelines for the authors of this ISI
session: “how to enhance stakeholders’ confidence in indicators? Which

An argument made by Pilar Martin/Guzman, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, in her
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presentation at the CESS meeting in Bamberg, 19 October 2018.
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