Rapid digitalization and awareness of the need to expand public participation in governance require updating methodological approaches to the study of trust. The aim of this article is to consider the theoretical bases of the studying of trust in the authorities in the information age. The conceptualization of the concept of trust was carried out within the framework of the approach of understanding trust as a rational way to overcome uncertainty and was based primarily on the theories of Piotr Sztompka and Russell Hardin. The choice of the approach is determined by the instrumental nature of the relationship between state and public institutions. The study used data from the reports of the international sociological study Edelman's Trust Barometer from 2010 to 2022. The introduction presents the author's model of trust of the act, which includes four mandatory elements: agent, subject, bet, and object. The first part of the article is dedicated to the consideration of the nature of the population's trust in the authorities. The justification of trust in the authorities is based on an assessment of the motivational and instrumental aspects of trustworthiness. The motivational aspect of trustworthiness is the set of motivations for actions that will justify trust. The instrumental aspect is related to the ability of the trust object to meet the expectations of the truster. The article shows that the authorities cannot be absolutely trustworthy on all issues in relation to all citizens. Reasonable trust in the authorities and state agents is available only to a small group of experts of the political field, and most citizens use only an indirect strategy for assessing trustworthiness. This is not a social pathology and is based on the nature of the state structure and cognitive limitations of a person in the complexity of a modern dynamic society. The second part of the article discusses the problems of measuring trust in the authorities in public opinion surveys. The author comes to the conclusion that mass quantitative surveys are not able to correctly measure trust and, in most cases, represent a one-dimensional assessment of the trustworthiness of the object under study, which is poorly correlated with the real behavior of people. However, a competent assessment of trustworthiness, carried out through the measurement of several factors, can give certain ideas about the propensity for trust and predict its implementation in social actions. The final part of the article describes the changes in the digital society that have affected the dynamics of trust in the authorities. Having found no convincing empirical evidence of the fact of a decrease in trust in the authorities, the author accepts this thesis as an axiom and analyzes the possible reasons for this phenomenon. The article concludes that the declared fact of a decrease in trust in the authorities in the digital era is only a decrease in the use of blind faith as a mechanism for overcoming uncertainty and can be justified by an increase in institutional openness, criticality and reflexivity of modern society.
