DeanTheDull on institutional credibility
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/on89vw/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_19_2021/h6clm7b/
Institutional trust is developed by institutions publicly purging bad actors at their own initiative and by taking politically and popularly unpopular positions and hits to institutional interests for the sake of a stated principle.
The former is a demonstration of professionalism, that an organization is self-policing and will curb its own excesses even in the absence of public failure. In any country you go corruption of some sort, explicit or implicit, is generally accepted and understood as part of the system, but social trust is often highest in organizations that not just claim to oppose such things, but regularly kick out members who are violate the rules. In an American context, the best example would probably be the US military, which is one of the most trusted institutions in the country. The US military, by it's very nature and job, routinely kills people (fight wars), doesn't tell the truth (classification), is often hugely inefficient or costly with taxpayer dollars (even if just in the sense of 'every dollar spent on the military could have been invested elsewhere', and routinely has stories of incompetence emerge. It's also largely filled by highschoolers, with all the basic competance and maturity that implies. These are not 'good things' that should breed confidence.
But the US military also has an exceptional institutional turnover and ejection rate, routinely kicking out the corrupt and incompetent as a matter of course at a rate almost no other institution or corporation dares. Part of this is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is routinely applied to soldiers who commit crimes, on or off duty, for a multitude of sins and errors. It never has, and never will be, a perfect justice system, but with everyone who's been in knowing someone who's been kicked out, and likely multiple, it produces a more credible reputation for removal than, say, the Rubber Rooms of the New York City school system.
Another aspect is the 'up or out' nature of retention- the US military requires members to either be on track for future promotion, or be separated, without the sort of 'rest on a career at a single position' you find in other militaries where someone could, if they wanted, rest in a single rank for an entire career. Because the rank hierarchy always gets narrower, this means that every few years a certain percentage of a year group will always be let go, and the military's evaluation/comparison system supports the people being let go being the less competent/worst remainers. Can you find incompetents in the military? Absolutely. But it's far harder to continually fail upward to settle at your level of incompetence: when everyone is raising or being weeded out, incompetents will often fail first.
None of this is to say it's all great or good or you can't find bad actors or corruption or anything else. But the American military can credibly claim to try to weed out the evil and the incompetent- and do so as a matter of course without requiring a public uproar- and it likely enjoys a high public trust in part as a result. Wrong-doers do get punished- routinely- without the public having to pressure the institution into it. (That other wrong-doers do not get punished doesn't necessarily take away from that- public legitimacy often follows the effort, not universal success.)
The other way to build institutional trust is basic credibility signalling. Trust is based on belief that you mean what you say, and if you want people to believe that you prioritize a stated value you must be able to demonstrate occasions where those values are put above other interests. This means cases where you lose money/backers, oppose ideological allies, or even confess to wrong-doing that you could have hidden (as in, apologies that were not a result of public/external pressure).
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The flip side of this is that institutional credibility will often crater if there's an unjust conspiracy pursued for blatantly self-serving reasons. People aren't necessarily upset about conspiracies or secrets per see- publics generally accept things like proprietary rights or secret strategies as legitimate. It's when conspiracy is used to protect political interests from censure that was deserved that institutional trust plummets, because this is a demonstration that the appearance of no wrong-doing is what matters more than ejecting wrong-doers. The Catholic Church is probably the best example of this on an international level, as the priest sex abuse scandal was truly an institutional coverup. More recently, the American medical institutions hemorrhaged public trust during the epidemic not simply for things like flip-flopping about masks and vaccine target goals, but also for the stance on good-vs-bad political protests as public health risks. These revealed a political interest, rather than a commitment to principle, that leads to second-guessing and skepticism of people who are having their own political self-interests affected on false pretenses. Not taking those people to task in turn reveals that the institutions they represent- formal or unorganized- are uninterested in addressing this sort of hypocrisy and deceit.
