Why is it so hard to Trust Politicians?

The level of trust in politicians in the Czech Republic is rather low. However, there are significant differences among different types of political institutions and levels of government. Moreover, e.g. trust in government varied in time extensively (e.g. so called technical government are trusted more than usual ones). Lyons (2013) in his study argued that that differences in institutional trust are related to salience. Institutions with high visibility to the public are trusted on the basis of their perceived political and economic performance. In contrast, institutions that are less salient to citizens are not evaluated on the basis of performance but on more diffuse criteria. The empirical results supported an expected influence of political performance. Otherwise, there was no systematic pattern to the determinants of trust in political institutions. In this paper we argue that the distrust with which Czech citizens look at politicians can be partly explained as an unintended consequence of the process of professionalization of politics. The professionalization accompanies democratization, it is a defense against an oligarchization and social closure of politics. However, it threatens democracy if the political class which only promotes their own interests replaces the political elite acting in the public interest. A mixture of data will be presented and analysed starting from public opinion polls up to comparative international surveys of political representatives of different government levels with special attention paid to the level of their professionalization. The low prestige of political professions is influenced by their media images that underline corruption cases related to particular politicians. In the opinion of a large section of the public the desire to accumulate wealth is a primary incentive for entering high politics. Politicians may be professionalized in terms of incomes but not to seen as professionals in terms of performance. In short these incongruent images are expressed in a successful political slogan of a new populist political movement YES2011 “We are not politicians, we are working hard!”