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IPS169 Markku L.
incorporated in indicators. In addition to competence and sincerity, the
perceived relevance of indicators is a crucial shaper of trust. Hence, in their
attempt at maximising the presumed objectivity and scientific quality of
indicators, in the spirit of ‘indicator culture’, statistical offices risk undermining
the relevance of, and hence trust in, indicators. The question can also be
formulated in the following manner: do we trust the statistical offices and
other indicator developers to be sincere in their commitment to producing
information that is useful and relevant for our daily practice?
Trust can build on either previous experience or on normative
predispositions and broader worldviews. For regular and occasional indicator
users, experience plays a significant – and often positive – role, whereas non-
users must rely on their normative predispositions in judging indicators and
their producers. However, as argued in the previous section, the concept of
ideological trust reminds of the pervasive nature of such normative factors:
also regular indicator users rely upon their ideological perceptions concerning
the respective roles of ‘meta-level’ institutions in society, and worldviews such
as those embedded in indicator culture.
Table 1 summarises the three dimensions of trust and the various sources
of trust as employed in this article.

Table 1. Summary of the key concepts relating to trust and mistrust.
Type of Social Institutional Ideological
trust/mistrust
Legitimacy of and
Generalised Diffuse support
Description support to meta-level
Particularised Specific support
institutions
Competence
Sincerity Worldviews, visions
Sources of Normative predisposition in relation to an institution or an
trust individual (trust)
Predictability, based on previous
experience (confidence)

5. Mistrust and distrust as assets – towards a more reflexive indicator
culture?
On the most fundamental level, as ‘healthy suspicion’, mistrust towards the
powers that be, constitutes a foundation for the vitality of a democratic system
– a form of “civic vigilance” (Laurian 2009), responsibility, and countervailing
power that helps citizens to hold political, economic and cultural elites to
account (Warren 1999, 310; Laurent 2009, 27; Allard et al. 2016, 14).
Organisations and procedures of regulation (e.g. auditing, evaluation, ranking,
and benchmarking) represent an institutionalised form of mistrust and

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