Submerged for Some: Government Visibility, Race, and American Political Distrust

• In Event: Policy Feedback and Public Opinion

Abstract

Accounts of American government visibility have emphasized the state's growing submergence over the last half-century. Building on this analysis, this paper asks two interrelated questions: First, if we have gained a better understanding of the parts of government that have grown less visible, what government entities and policies have become more conspicuous during this same time period? Second, have various social groups experienced these shifts in government visibility differently?

In response to these questions, this paper utilizes in-depth interviews, ethnography, and quantitative analysis to argue that five public policy trends over the last fifty years have fostered a racial split in American government visibility. For whites, this time period has witnessed a contrast in the growth of hidden welfare state policies that disproportionately favor white Americans with the rising visibility of poverty programs perceived as disproportionately benefitting people of color. Similarly, the rise of anti-tax rhetoric during this same time period has made taxation a particularly obvious manifestation of the state. Together these trends have generated a dynamic in which government is most visible to white Americans as an entity that wastes “their” tax dollars on “welfare” programs. During this same time period, I show that the decline of civil rights legislation has clashed with the growing presence of the criminal justice system, as seen in the rise of mass incarceration and “broken windows” policing. Consequently, the criminal justice system has become a uniquely visible face of government among people of color. In establishing the political ramifications of this racial split, I use a theoretical framework that combines policy feedback and political psychology to demonstrate how this dual visibility helps explain the historically low levels of political trust in contemporary America. More specifically, I demonstrate that where distrust of government is linked to welfare attitudes among whites, it is connected to feelings about the police among people of color.

Ultimately, these findings contribute to government visibility scholarship by revealing how the growth of the hidden welfare state clashed with other public policy shifts to create a government that is conspicuous in all the wrong places. As a result, Americans are joined together in their antipathy for government, but divided in the parts of the state to which that antipathy is attached.

Author

• Aaron Rosenthal, Simmons College