Introduction
Is there anything, our personal ethics aside, that governs or regulates the way we interact with others? Is there anything that determines whether and the extent to which we can, in conflict of interest situations, pursue our personal interests at the expense of another person? And when there is coincidence of interest between interacting parties, is there anything that determines whether and to what extent these parties can conspire to take advantage of a third party? Douglass North, the 1993 Economics Nobel Laureate, argued that “Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of 
conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange … Institutions provide the incentive structure of an economy; as that structure evolves, it shapes the direction of economic change towards growth, stagnation, or decline (North, 1991, p 97)”.
This understanding of institutions lies at the heart of much of modern thinking about regulating behaviour, creating social order and more generally, about development. We therefore ought to think seriously about the appropriateness and relevance, and the quality and performance of our institutions; and in the case of institutional failures, the process of institutional change and reform.
We must also consider that even if there is a strong commitment to institutional reform, people may have no confidence in those institutions. When this happens, institutional performance will continue to be weak. A case in point is that of the attempts to reform the Guyana Police Force. If people do not trust the police force enough to comply with their law enforcement efforts, or to even call on the police to intervene when the law is being broken, crime will continue to spiral upwards despite our best efforts at reforming our law enforcement institutions. TIGI’s mission mandates it to focus on all these issues. We begin by looking, at what it takes to get people to trust the institutions that regulate our behaviour.
Rebuilding institutional trust after elections: The key role of citizen engagement
Institutional trust, which is often narrowly interpreted as trust/confidence in government, means that the citizens have confidence in the institutions that structure their interactions in situations in which they, the citizens, are vulnerable to being ‘taken advantage of’ (Secor & Loughlin, 2005). Such situations occur every day and affect both routine and less predictable transactions with governmental and non-governmental agencies. The public tends to have greater trust in institutions when the authorities are not expected to abuse their powers to intentionally cause harm or serve narrow interests without consideration of the harm done. In return, the citizens tend to defer more to decisions made by officials and to voluntarily comply with rules (Khodyakov, 2007).
It has been argued that institutional trust is important for democratic sustainability and crucial to regime legitimacy, and its absence would retard the effectiveness of the institutions (Ayidin & Cenker, 2011). But what if institutional trust is already low, having perhaps been seriously undermined by corruption (Armah-Attoh, Gyimah-Boadi, & Barbara Chikwanha, 2007), and a new government is elected with a mandate to restore confidence?
Across Latin America, a change of president (change in party in power; not within the same party) is followed by a “surge-and-decline” pattern that reflect initial improvements in corruption perception indices as the new governments address corruption in the erstwhile administrations, avoid corruption scandals, and as the public is optimistic about the governance of the new administration (Johnson, 2015). After about two years into the new administrations however, corruption perception indices begin to decline. The existence of this cycle in perception linked to election of a new president suggests that elections and partisan turnover in government are not adequate for curbing corruption since politicians seek to conceal it and the threat of losing office is neither certain nor costly enough to act as a deterrent (Johnson, 2015).
Essentially, the honeymoon will end and the citizens need to be vigilant and should remain actively engaged in the political process if they are to retain the gains made through changes in government, and to even effect delivery of campaign promises. Even after a government is duly elected, it is important that it contemplates and executes programmes that are important to the citizens, avoids corruption and musters the political will to address corruption.
If a change of government is not enough to restore and rebuild institutional trust, the role of the citizens who elect the government is indeed crucial. In this regard, it is important to differentiate among high trust, low trust and active distrust. Very high trust leads to total confidence in public institutions, which is a state marked by unquestioning support for the actions of government. It is widely acknowledged that this state of affairs is linked to naivety on the part of the citizens (Krouwel & Abts, 2007). Such naivety can create fertile grounds for corruption since the citizens have freed themselves of the effort of monitoring the actions of government. Low trust on the other hand leads to vigilance and activism as the citizens remain sceptical about the intentions of the government and apply pressure using the means available to effect changes or to arrest potential failures (Van de Walle & Six, 2013).
Our understanding of distrust is undergoing changes with more recent developments in the political literature. The emerging understanding is that distrust is not necessarily low trust or the absence of trust altogether but an attitude in its own right, characterized by political disconnectedness and indifference evidenced by withdrawal from the political process in the belief that agitating for change is futile (Van de Walle & Six, 2013). Like total confidence, a state of distrust can be fertile ground for corruption because the political disconnectedness and cynicism about institutions themselves discourage the greater vigilance on the part of citizens referred to above. Distrust in institutions is an equilibrium that is difficult to dislodge as it requires the engagement of the same citizens who have become disconnected.
The events following the last General and Regional Elections suggest strongly that Guyanese – including the “fourth estate” media – are prepared to hold the newly elected government accountable for the performance of public institutions. This vigilance on the part of citizens is to be commended rather than discouraged, and is natural to the ‘low institutional trust’ state. Perhaps the change in government has even broken a distrust culture and ushered in a renewed state of low trust with the result that more Guyanese, including those that have previously felt excluded, have joined the political debate. At this juncture, it is imperative that we understand that criticisms may mean greater engagement in the political process spurred by renewed hope. By denouncing vigilance, we end up undermining citizen engagement leading perhaps to a relapse of distrust in the process of institutional reform and the institutions themselves.
Empirical Evidence of Low Trust in Public Institutions in Guyana
Although institutional trust may be measured in many ways, the use of several items targeting various institutions is often recommended as this provides for wide coverage of the relevant entities that exist in a society. Specifically, for Guyana, the GDF has remained among the institutions in which the citizens have the highest level of trust whereas the police force has languished at the bottom (Figure 1). This is confirmed by both the Latin American Barometer study (LAPOP) executed by Vanderbilt University and the Values and Poverty Study (VAPO) in Guyana that was done jointly by the University of Guyana and Ghent University (Thomas et al., 2015). That notwithstanding, the level of trust has remained relatively low across several institutions including parliament, national government, justice system etc. leading to an overall low level of trust in public institutions in Guyana (Thomas et al., 2015). In fact, as shown in Figure 1, trust in institutions dipped below the middle value (4) in 2014 for nearly all of the institutions included. Whether or not this is linked to the ousting of the former government in 2015 might be a topic of interest to researchers on the local scene.
