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IPS169 Markku L.
of discussions on post-truth. This type of trust relates to higher-level
institutions, such as democracy, the state, market, and planning, and their
legitimate roles in society (Tait 2011, 158). As a more abstract form of trust, it
is difficult to capture via quantitative surveys. It concerns schemes of
interpretation of reality, relating to means-ends relationships and strategies
(Söderbaum 1999; 2013, p. 223), i.e. to “wider abstract systems and ideas”,
such as economic growth models, the legitimate role of government in
intervening in the economy (Tait 2011, 160), technological optimism,
centralised or decentralised solutions (Söderbaum 1999, 163), or the
legitimacy of the purposes of data collection for production of statistics and
indicators. Unlike social and institutional trust, ideological trust does not draw
on previous evidence or knowledge, but “on an individual’s or institution’s
place within wider social discursive structures” (Tait 2011, 160).
To the extent that non-users mistrust indicators, this mistrust is largely
ideologically founded, precisely because of their lack of first-hand experience.
This is by means not to say that ‘users’ and creators of indicators would be
free of ideological postulates and assumptions. The very birth of statistics as a
state endeavour, and their further development in the early 19 century in the
th
hands of ‘social reformers’ (Bascand 2009), involved judgements concerning
the legitimate roles of the state, experts, and the civil society. Moreover, the
cultural and institutional context is vital: countries and democratic cultures
vary not only with respect to their traditions concerning the respective roles
of the state, the private sector and the civil society, but also when it comes to
the roles that trust and mistrust have played in their development. For
example, liberal democracy is arguably founded in mistrust amongst citizens
towards the state (e.g. Warren 1999, 310; Lenard 2008), whereas in the Nordic
countries, democracy has developed upon a trustful social contract between
the state and the citizens (e.g. Montin 2015).
Ideological trust in the area of indicators finds one of its most prominent
examples in what has been variously called “indicator culture” (Merry 2016),
‘trust in numbers’ (Porter 1995), or audit culture (Power 1999; Shore & Wright
4
2015), including phenomena such as the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’
and false precision (Hicks et al. 2015). More generally, these cultures and
beliefs are founded in “trust in technical rationality, in the legibility of the social
world through measurement and statistics, and in the capacity of numbers to
render different social worlds commensurable” (Merry 2016). Trust in numbers
– in science as a form of obtaining information, and the corresponding
scepticism about politics – is fundamentally ideological in nature. It is crucial
to examine, however, the interaction between the dimensions of trust: the

4 The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is commonly described as mistaking a theoretical
construct for a physical or ‘concrete’ reality.
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