Loss of Trust in Non-Political Institutions: Explanations and Consequences

• In Event: Advances in Measures of Political Attitudes (Virtual Session)

Abstract

Growing distrust and partisan polarization of trust in American government have been amply documented over the past fifty years. We extend this work to look at growing polarization of confidence in nominally non-political institutions (e.g., religion, police, the military, the press, higher education, medicine, and science) using four different overtime datasets from 1967 to 2021 (Gallup, GSS, Harris, and Pew). Using trend data we explore the changes over time in confidence in each of these institutions. Using specific data-sets from different time-periods and literature on the evolution of each institution we examine various explanations for loss of trust and polarization of trust in these institutions including scandals and corruption, performance failures, high costs, perceived or real deviations from societal norms, changing cultural norms, specific events, a general distrust and alienation from institutions, and politicization of non-political institutions and occupations. We show that there is evidence that events such as scandals in an institution affect confidence in that institution. For example, scandals in the Catholic Church affected confidence in religion among Catholics. Concerns about performance clearly matter for confidence in institutions such as the military and police. Concerns about costs matter for institutions such as higher education. Concerns about deviating from cultural norms such as “fairness” and “free speech” affect evaluations of the press and higher education. Changing cultural norms affect confidence in institutions such as the police. There is also strong evidence that there has been a secular increase among some groups in alienation from government and that has spilled over into alienation from non-political institutions. Most importantly, however, we show that there has been an increasingly “political” lens developed for evaluating more and more institutions. We explore the possible sources of this increased politicization. In addition, we also investigate the consequences of this polarization by considering assessments of the desirability of having a family member become a member of an institution as a journalist, businessperson, professor, or member of the military. By comparing data from the 1970s with recent data, we show that affective polarization – not wanting a family member to join a profession seen to be comprised of those of an opposing party – was once quite modest, but it is now much larger and it extends to people's affective assessments of occupations in these institutions (e.g., police, journalists, professors, and the military) in a way that it never has in the past. We end with a discussion of what this means for American democracy that depends upon non-political institutions to provide for healthy and safety, education, consumer goods, information, and many other things.

Authors

• Thomas Bradley Kent, UC Berkeley

• Henry E. Brady, University of California, Berkeley