ABSTRACT
This chapter and the one that follows examine the many ways in which governments can influence trust. This chapter concentrates on political trust and the first section looks at political change from the perspective of social contract theory. The theory, of course, is one of many hypotheses that seek to explain political developments during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has been adopted here because it accords most closely with the concept of social capital.1 It is argued that there existed between rulers and the ruled a strong trust relationship. At the start of the century, this social contract encompassed the community and the local elite, and, later, it additionally included the state and the electorate. The macro then gives way to the micro and the second and third parts of the chapter investigate how bonds of loyalty between the various political representatives and their electorates were established and identify the contribution made by local government networks to the production of personal, social and various other types of trust.
