Russell Hardin

If we are to have political, legal, and constitutional order, we must first have a substantial degree of general social order to enable us to create and organize these grander orders. In short, such general order is causally prior to these other broad social orders. General social order historically has been built up spontaneously, perhaps through creation of norms that are enforced within the society whose more general order we wish to explain. It seems likely that many of the members of our society need not recognize many of the norms that govern our actions. Moreover, unlike pristine theory, the societal problem is subject to instrumentalist arguments, at least in a theoretical sense, for many of our social norms. Among the most important of these norms are those that coordinate our actions in manifold repetitive contexts.

There seems to be a declining public trust in government, and this decline may not be the symptom of a major problem. Rather, it may be the inevitable result of the declining role of government in the age of economic globalisation. It can be argued that the economic system has become so advanced that it has become highly independent from traditional state control and regulation, so public trust in government will naturally decline because there will be less need for it in the future than in the past. This perspective bears some significant implications for future research and practice concerning public trust in government.

There are three centrally important ways in which norms have been elaborated and explained: in terms of religious or natural law strictures on behavior, in terms of constraints imposed by rationality, and, recently, in terms of agents' behavior in well-defined games. The principal difficulty of a gaming account of norms is to show how the account explains motivations of individuals to follow the norms. This issue is examined in the context of small-number norms and large-number norms.

The paradox of mass voting is not, generally speaking, matched by a paradoxical mass attempt to be politically well informed. As Converse underscored, most people are grossly politically ignorant—just as they would be if, as rational‐ignorance theory holds, they realized that their votes don't matter. Yet many millions of them contradict the theory by voting. This contradiction, and the illogical reasons people offer for voting, suggest that the logic of collective action does not come naturally to people (as teachers of the theory know well). To equate public ignorance with “rational ignorance,” then, attributes too much theoretical self‐consciousness to people. Even if their ignorance is not based on a grasp of the collective‐action problem, however, people's political ignorance is “rational”: but it is less a matter of calculating the low benefit likely to flow from one vote in a sea of millions, than of encountering the much higher cost of being well informed as compared to voting. As the high cost of becoming well informed appears likely to grow, it may be advisable to move off of the political agenda issues that have no clear continuum toward which a mostly ignorant median voter may gravitate.