A Study On The Trust Of Public Right Agent And Its Formation Mechanism

The research on political trust is of great significance for it not only acts as a lubricating agent to the stability and development of a political system, but also represents as an important resource for the pumping of the legitimacy of domination to a regime. In the meanwhile, as political trust showed different characteristics and working mechanisms in different times, the research on political trust needs to have some changes accordingly. In the contemporary society, the political trust manifests in what form? How to make it works?In order to answer the two questions above, this paper firstly, created a new concept, i.e. the agency trust of public power, as one of the forms of political power in the modern society. And secondly, this paper also designed a forming mechanism for the realization of the agency trust of public power, which tries to answer how to make the new form of trust work tentatively. These two answers can be exemplified as follows in detail.In the first place, the new concept this paper raised is based on the trust theory and contract theory. Different from traditional forms of political trust which are based on the expansion of the personal trust, the agency trust of public power is a modernized and institutionalized form of political trust. As a key method to the solution of the agency problems of public power, the agency trust of public power is likely to realize the ideal condition of for the public agent to keep his word self-consciously and then lowers down the agency cost through the establishment of the trust relationship from the principal to the agent. In the second place, the forming mechanism is the solution for the realization of the agency trust of public power. This mechanism is formed by two dynamic processes. They are the agency process of the control on the agent by the principal and of the institutionalization of the agency rules. The first process contains the control of the election of agents, the budget control of fiscal spending, and the social surveillance on the behaviors of the elected agents by the principal in order to prevent and deter the possible misdeeds by agents. In the second process, the agency rules will be established, socialized and internalized incrementally. The word "establishment" means the set up of a system of agency rules, the word "socialization" means the formation of the appraisal criteria on the judgment the behaviors of the agents socially, and the word "internalization" means that the belief to follow the agency rules by the agents being internalized. As the two processes evolve on, the agency rules will be institutionalized gradually and control efforts on the agents will be loosed, and the agency trust of public power finally being formed and the modern "general will" finally being achieved.