In Print:Political Trust and the Future of American Politics By Marc J. Hetherington

An excerpt from Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism.

In the mid-1960s, most Americans supported government programs designed to benefit those who were the object of racial discrimination and the less well off and believed the programs would work. According to a September 1964 poll taken by Gallup, twice as many Americans approved of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as disapproved. In August 1965, a solid plurality of Americans believed that the Johnson administration's War on Poverty would help wipe out poverty in the United States. Americans trusted that the federal government would make judicious use of their tax dollars and be fair in its efforts to end discrimination between the races. Although support for redistributive spending and race-targeted policies was far from universal even in the Great Society years, it was sufficiently robust that Lyndon Johnson could pursue one of the most progressive public policy agendas in the nation's history.

Over the last forty years, Americans have come to trust their government less, a change that has had far-reaching consequences. Most importantly, it has placed enormous constraints on progressives. In the aggregate, [there is] an impressive fit between how much Americans trust government and the liberalness of policy enacted by political elites. Politicians over the last forty years have shown an uncanny ability to match how much government they give people with how much government people want, as manifested in their trust in government. Political trust provides a useful shorthand for elites because ordinary Americans have a much easier time articulating their feelings about government than their complicated and often contradictory ideological predispositions.

In addition, this mechanism works on the individual level. Many liberal public policies require that the many make at least perceived sacrifices for the few. From the perspective of those making the sacrifices, moreover, such programs may carry perceived risk as well, such as when the sacrificers do not think highly of the beneficiaries of a government program. When the public does not trust that government will implement such policies efficiently or fairly, people will prefer that government not be involved. That is why political trust is only important in explaining the policy preferences of individuals who perceive that a policy requires a sacrifice or entails risk. This is important because programs that many perceive require sacrifice of them are the only ones for which public support has dried up considerably over the last thirty years.

Decreasing trust in government over the last two generations has undermined public support for federal programs like welfare, food stamps, and foreign aid, not to mention the entire range of race-targeted programs designed to make equality between the races a reality. Even though almost all Americans would like to rid the country of poverty and achieve greater racial equality, many do not trust the government enough to support the programs designed to realize these goals.

While most political commentators attribute the move to the right in American politics to a conservative turn in public opinion, this is not so. No matter the measure of ideology, I find no evidence of an ideological right turn. Moreover, if the public's ideological preferences had moved to the right, it would have caused increased support for limited government in almost all areas, something that has simply not occurred. While widespread public distrust favors the policy agenda of conservatives, it should not be confused with conservatism.

It should be troubling that at least part of the decline in political trust rests on misperceptions of political reality. While the federal government certainly wastes some percentage of tax dollars (the best estimates are below 5 percent), the percentage does not approach the average of nearly 50 percent that the public perceives. A relentlessly negative news media, which focuses far too heavily on the anomalous cases of waste, fraud, and abuse, bears much of the blame for this set of circumstances. Unfortunately, journalistic norms about what makes a good story ensure that this type of reporting will continue in the future.

More troubling is the degree to which Americans misperceive what government does, which also has a deleterious effect on political trust. Even though foreign aid and classic welfare programs combine to make up less than 10 percent of the federal budget, nearly half the public believes that one or the other is the single biggest item. Fewer than 15 percent of Americans correctly identify Social Security as the costliest federal program. These misperceptions have important consequences..." [W]hen asked to evaluate the federal government, people have on their mind "people on welfare," who receive relatively little from the government, but not "older people" or "the elderly," who receive quite a lot. Since most people would rather help older people than people on welfare, trust in government would increase markedly if the news media, in conjunction with political leaders, made a concerted effort to educate the public about what the government actually spends its money on. Support for redistributive, racial, and foreign aid programs would increase markedly as a result.

It is also interesting to note how inextricably political trust is tied to race..." [D]eclining political trust in the late 1960s and early 1970s was, in part, the result of Americans' dissatisfaction with specific racial policies like busing and the government's more general efforts to integrate public schools and to provide aid to blacks. Thirty years later, trust and race are still joined, but in a different causal way. Now, in addition to low levels of trust undermining public support for race-targeted policies among whites. antiblack stereotypes increase the negative effect that political trust has on whites' support for racialized redistributive programs, such as welfare and food stamps. If all whites thought well of African-Americans, political trust's effect on support for redistribution (and also the range of explicitly race-targeted policies) would be minimal, which would increase support for these programs substantially in this environment with low political trust.

These results carry normative weight as well. In the case of poverty and race, for example, no institution or set of institutions other than the federal government has confronted these issues in a sustained and meaningful way. Perhaps in a perfect world, churches, volunteer organizations, and private enterprise could end poverty. But, in twenty-first-century America, none have the resources, or are willing to commit the resources, to even begin to play such a role. Similarly, some of the progress on school integration that was made between the 1960s and 1980s has been lost in the past decade. Although Americans express increasing concern about school integration, they are not particularly supportive of the federal government playing a role to ensure it. Since the recent return to segregation has been centered in the South and in the suburbs, it seems unlikely that any institution other than the federal government is positioned to confront this problem. Given that easily identifiable groups are disproportionately damaged by the present antiredistribution, anti-race policy political agenda--an agenda that has been fueled by declining political trust-the loss of political trust since the 1960s presents a threat to the representativeness of American political institutions.