Trust, Democracy, and Multicultural Challenges

Banning minarets by referendum in Switzerland, burning Korans in the United States, prohibiting the Sikh kirpan in Canadian public spaces: Patti Tamara Lenard reads these episodes as signs of a growing backlash against diversity, and of something more fragile beneath it. Her argument is that trust sits at the centre of effective democratic politics, and that rising immigration can strain it when citizens come to feel that the values and norms of their public culture are no longer truly shared.

Rather than treating distrust as inevitable, Lenard insists that failing to shape policy around diversity is a failure of democracy itself. She sets out how a revitalised public culture might build trust between newcomers and established citizens, so that the quality of democracy holds. A clear, carefully reasoned book for students of political theory and anyone thinking seriously about how plural societies hold together.