Universal Governance Design

Institutions must be trustworthy, not just trusted (repeating again for everyone in the back).

Photo by Aleksandr Barsukov on Unsplash

For years there was a bridge in my town that I drove under several times a week. From underneath, stopped at the light, you could see exposed rebar and bare patches where chunks of the deck had spalled off and dropped onto the shoulder. Rust bled down the concrete in long streaks. At some point somebody strung netting under the span to catch the next piece before it landed on a windshield. The netting sagged.

Now imagine a public information campaign. The bridge is inspected. The bridge meets standards! The engineers have signed off, and the engineers know more about load-bearing structures than you do, which is true. Trust the bridge, Because Experts.

You can run that campaign forever. It might even work for a while. But at some point your eyes override the expert consensus, because the expert consensus is asking you to disbelieve the rebar. And the campaign gets one thing exactly backwards: your distrust of that bridge is not a misinformation problem. It is information. It may be the most rational data-processing you do all day.

I say this as a card-carrying member of the expert class in question. I’m a political theorist who studies institutions for a living and an associate dean who runs a few (or at least tries to keep them running). I have spent a good portion of my adult life telling students and neighbors some version of “trust the process.” I still believe in processes. I also drove under that bridge for years, and I noticed that I had stopped parking anywhere near it.

Trust in nearly every major American institution has been falling for decades: medicine, media, higher ed, Congress, the courts. The standard diagnosis treats this as a demand-side problem. Voters have been propagandized, or they’re cynical, or they don’t understand how the sausage gets made, and the fix is to educate them back into deference. Some of that is real. Conspiracy thinking exists, and some perfectly sound bridges get slandered.

But there is a supply side to trust, and we barely talk about it. Before you ask why people don’t trust institutions, you have to ask whether the institutions are trustworthy. Those are different questions. The first is about psychology. The second is about design.

“Because Experts”

The official answer to institutional distrust has mostly been reassurance: fact sheets, media literacy curricula, louder credentials, a fresh coat of paint over the rebar. Reassurance is what you offer when you believe the problem is in the audience. Repair is what you offer when you believe the problem is in the bridge.

Reassurance also carries a hidden cost. Every “the bridge is fine” that contradicts what a driver just experienced on the bridge does nothing to transfer trust to the structure. It drains trust from the speaker. People are quite good at integrating expert testimony with their own crossings, and when the two conflict repeatedly, they don’t stop believing their tires. They stop believing the experts. This is how institutions burn through the credibility of the entire professional class defending them. The pandemic-era whiplash on masks and school closures worked exactly this way: each confident pronouncement that got walked back cost more than silence would have.

Which means the question for anyone who cares about expertise, and I do, is what makes an institution worth trusting in the first place. Trustworthiness turns out to be something you can inspect for, the way you’d inspect a bridge.

Every Bridge Is Built for Somebody

Every institution is built for someone: a default user it quietly assumes.

With physical bridges, the assumption is visible. The freeway overpass with no sidewalk is a perfectly good bridge if you own a car; if you’re on foot, it isn’t infrastructure. It’s a wall with traffic on top. The on-ramp only locals know about works fine for locals. The posted detour assumes you can read the language it’s posted in.

Institutions make the same assumptions, often with less visibility. A school day that ends at 2:30 assumes a parent who is free at 2:30. A court system assumes you can either afford a lawyer or decode filings written for one; you learn the rules by being towed. A benefits program assumes income rises smoothly, so in Kentucky a $4,000 raise can trigger $10,000 in lost benefits for a family of three, a toll charged mid-span, after you’ve committed to the crossing and can’t back up (the Kentucky response is an interesting case study in institutional reform itself). An occupational licensing regime assumes the gatehouse fee is small and the gate is single.

Mariana, a Certified Professional Midwife, catches babies for a living and is good at it; whether she may do it legally depends on which side of a state line she is standing on and on a collaborating physician’s signature she cannot get. The toll that is a rounding error for a corporatized hospital system is, for her, a closed road.

The distributive math runs the same direction most of the time. It’s deeply regressive. The blown tire, the lost day in line, the compliance fee, the form that must be filed in person on a weekday: these costs are roughly flat, and they land on people with wildly unequal capacity to absorb them. The toll is flat but the damage isn’t. A bridge built for a narrow default user is regressive by construction, and nobody had to intend that for it to be true.

So who is the default user? The problem again comes back to visibility: we design institutions for the most visible people. These are often the most powerful; those in the room with us. Availability bias is real and we’re also simply limited by what we don’t know that we don’t know. Turns out that deep pluralism runs deep (thus the name!) and the people designing institutions almost always miss the actual range of humans trying to cross them: religious and secular, neurodivergent and neurotypical, rural and urban, the trades and the professions, and the four or five political tribes that don’t fit on a left-right line.

This is partly why I find the current diversity wars so exhausting. One camp counts demographic representation; the other counts ideological representation; both try to measure, mandate, and manage pluralism from the top down. It’s the same managerial premise on a different variable. The real diversity on the road is deeper than either checklist, and the real question is structural: which institutions can carry the range of travelers that already exists?

Run the Circuit in Reverse

Trust is built the way a bridge earns its reputation: crossing by crossing. You drive over it and nothing happens. You drive over it a thousand more times and nothing happens. “Nothing happens” sounds like faint praise, but it is the entire product. Legitimacy is a reservoir filled one uneventful crossing at a time. The authority that owns the span cannot issue its own reputation, however many press releases it prints.

Now run the circuit in reverse. A bridge built for a narrow default user starts shedding the users it wasn’t built for. First they route around it quietly: the informal childcare swap, the cash arrangement off the books. Exit, in the vocabulary of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, after voice failed or was never on offer. Black markets are the bridges people build when the official one won’t carry them.

The people with the most resources exit first, and they exit upward. Where the public crossing has failed or never existed, the crossing privatizes: the concierge physician, the private school, the $50,000 admissions consultant, or the gated community with its own security contract. The wealthy charter a helicopter over the river while everyone else stands at the wall, and the void becomes a sorting mechanism that sorts by wealth.

And once the people with the most political power have helicoptered out, watch what happens to the bridge. The constituency for maintenance evaporates. Repair budgets become raidable. The feedback that should have driven the redesign stops arriving, because the remaining users are precisely the people whose complaints carry the least weight. Quality falls further, which justifies more exit, which weakens the institution again. I’ve watched higher ed run this spiral from the inside. Felt illegitimacy concentrates exactly where buying power runs out, and the people still standing on the failing deck draw the reasonable conclusion that the bridge was never engineered for them.

That conclusion is the part the trust campaigns refuse to metabolize. The commuter who has stopped trusting the bridge is not failing civics. She has audited the institution with her own crossings and reached a defensible finding. Divestment on that scale calls for repair rather than reproach. You cannot message your way out of a vicious cycle. You can only build your way out.

How to Design a Trustworthy Bridge

My bridge was the easy case. Rebar is visible to anyone stopped at a light, and the case I can defend hardest is exactly that kind: the bridge you cross with your own body. The school that lets out at 2:30, the benefits cliff, the licensing gatehouse, the courthouse, the campus. There your eyes really do override the experts, because you are the instrument reading the load.

Most institutional failure isn’t visible from the car. You can’t eyeball the soundness of the FDA or the Federal Reserve, and most of our crossings of those arrive secondhand, filtered through feeds engineered to show us rebar whether or not the deck is cracked. Manufactured rebar is a real industry. So the perception gap cuts both ways: people keep trusting some institutions that are quietly failing them and distrust some that are sound, and distrust can overshoot into a taste for rubble. That is real, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But notice where it cuts hardest: precisely where you can’t inspect for yourself. That’s an argument for building institutions you can inspect, not against it. Posted limits, published inspections, predictable outcomes, and working feedback channels: these are what let an ordinary user tell a failing bridge from a slandered one. An institution that shows its work gives you something better than reassurance. It gives you a way to check.

Trustworthiness, in other words, is a design property, and you can write the spec. The spec is partial, and every line translates off an actual bridge.

Posted load limits, applied evenly. A trustworthy institution publishes its rules and its inspection reports before you commit to the crossing, and then applies them the same way for years, regardless of whose truck it is. Predictability is the product, and “nothing ever happens” is the highest praise a bridge can earn. The load rating cannot quietly change depending on connections or identity. The fastest way to destroy an institution’s trustworthiness is for users to learn the rules by being towed, or to discover that outcomes track who they are rather than what’s posted.

The pothole hotline. Trustworthy institutions hear about cracks before the collapse, through working feedback channels and scheduled inspections. In the brittle version, the first feedback anyone receives is the failure itself.

The retrofit. A good bridge can take a bike lane later. Institutions need the same property: adaptable to users the designers never anticipated, rather than facing every new traveler with a choice between as-is and abandonment.

More than one crossing. Redundancy keeps everyone honest. One bridge, one owner, one chokepoint is an invitation to capture, and a captured chokepoint always charges a regressive toll. Real alternatives let exit discipline the institution instead of merely escaping it.

Comment while the concrete is wet. Voice has to arrive while the design can still change. Hearings held after the blueprints are finalized are theater, and users can tell.

The engineer drives across it daily. The people who design institutions need skin in the game. The people certifying the bridge should be on it regularly. Regulators who never use what they approve, and administrators exempt from their own systems, are why so many institutional decks crack.

Underneath all of these sits one architectural choice. You can build for a default user and bolt on ramps afterward, one accommodation per squeaky wheel. Or you can assume the full range of travelers in the basic design. Accommodation makes every difference an exception to process, so inclusion depends on who asks, and when, and the structure fails the first case nobody foresaw. Universal design multiplies pathways by default, so that nobody has to file a request to belong, and the structure holds diversity it never predicted. The curb cut was designed for wheelchairs and turned out to serve strollers, delivery carts, travelers with luggage, and every kid on a bike. Accessibility is resilience. They are the same property viewed from different angles.

The obvious objection is that somebody still has to decide what the bridge must carry, and whoever holds that pen can flatten the landscape they claim to be designing for. One answer is a mechanism rather than a magic number: many crossings, no single owner. Overlapping authorities, decisions pushed to the lowest competent level, and local variation within shared commitments. Elinor Ostrom spent a career, most famously in Governing the Commons, documenting how polycentric systems again and again outperformed central designers at exactly this kind of problem. No one entity decides for every river.

Repair Before Reproach

Demanding trust is the one move that cannot produce it. Trust is downstream of trustworthiness the way a bridge’s reputation is downstream of its load-bearing record, and no civics curriculum substitutes for a deck that holds.

The asymmetry in the current ask makes it worse. The loudest demands that ordinary citizens trust public institutions tend to come from the people best equipped to skip them: private alternatives in schooling, medicine, security, and law that let them avoid the failing crossing entirely. I don’t read that mainly as hypocrisy. I read it as physics. When the people with the most political power exit, the constituency for maintenance goes with them, the repair budgets turn raidable, and the feedback that should drive the redesign stops arriving. A bridge the decision-makers never ride is a bridge that quietly stops being maintained.

So the radical moderate’s position is the unglamorous one: not rubble, not reassurance, but the repair crew, arriving with the inspection report and the rebar. Yes, distrust can overshoot, and some of the loudest critics would rather have rubble than repair. But institutions earned most of this distrust honestly, and tearing down every span out of spite would strand the people who have no helicopter first. The repair crew is the only one of the three that builds anything.

And the bridge in my town? The state finally tore it down this summer. After years of netting and reassurance, the demolition crew showed up and admitted in steel and dust what every driver stopped at that light had known for a decade. I won’t pretend it didn’t feel like vindication. It was also the most trustworthy thing the bridge’s owners ever did, because for once the official action matched the visible evidence. Nobody needed a fact sheet to believe that wrecking ball.

Now there’s a gap where the span used to be, and the rare thing failing institutions almost never get: a clean sheet. The design question waiting in that gap is the one this whole post has been circling. Who is the new bridge for? Build it for the actual range of travelers, Mariana and the families waiting on her included, with the sidewalk in the blueprints instead of bolted on in thirty years, and then let it be boring. Boring is what trust feels like from the inside. A thousand crossings where nothing happens.

Your Turn

Which institution is your bridge: the one you used to cross without thinking and now brace on? And what would it actually take, concretely and structurally, for you to trust it again? Not reassurance. What repair? Tell me in the comments; the best examples are never the ones I’d think of. And if you liked what you read above, subscribe and share! This idea is the foundation of my next book and I’d love to hear all the thoughts - good, bad and ugly - as I work through these ideas in real time.