Trust/Approval of federal government hits all-time low

Flickr photo by reskiebak

Approval ratings for Congress dropped into single digits this month for the first time since CBS News and the New York Times began asking the question more than three decades ago.

A New York Times/CBS poll conducted between October 21-24, 2011 showed just 9% percent of US respondents approving of the job of Congressional lawmakers. [The question read “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?’] This is a drop from 11% back in September and the first time approval ratings have been in single digits over the almost three and half decades that the question has been asked (since 1977). [84% in the recent October poll said they did not trust congressional lawmakers and 9% said they didn’t know.]

Rates of approval peaked in the early 2000s when over 60% approved of the way Congress was handling its job and has dropped precipitously since then.

The same precipitous drop is true about trust of national government.  [Question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?”]  Trust of national government hit an all-time low in October 2011 of 10%.  Back in the early 2000s, about 55% of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington.

One can see the time series for Congressional approval and trust of the federal government since 1977 here.

For sure, a heavy component in these declines in trust are macro assessments about the economy and the country.  That said, at least in the short-term, the precipitous decline in trust of government presents a strong headwind for those who aspire to mobilize government to do something either about record high levels of inequality or to help stimulate the US out of the deepest recession it has experienced in the last century.   I am also working on some scholarship with Chaeyoon Lim (not yet published) that suggests that partisanship may be greater in times of greater economic woes, so this may also be playing a role in the declining trust.

See earlier comments of Bob Putnam from 18 months ago on these declines in governmental trust.

Putnam: The Perfect (Temporary) Storm in Declining Trust

(Flickr photo Kalieye)

Robert Putnam appeared on Talk of the Nation yesterday concerning the recent Pew Research Center surveys on Trust in Government showing that trust in government is at a several decade low.

Putnam noted that  surveys of trust in local or national government mainly flow from macro assessments of how well things are going in society and whether government is honest and trustworthy, not personal experiences with bureaucracy.

Putnam observed that record high levels of trust in government post WW-II “stemmed from the success of the U.S. government in…getting out of the Great Depression and winning the War….It didn’t mean that they were necessarily happy or unhappy when they…filled out their IRS form…. That high level of trust collapsed first …  around the time of intervention in Vietnam and then another big drop when Watergate was revealed….”

Putnam noted the strong connections between the condition of the economy and trust. Pew’s work and others shows rising trust in the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Given that the economy is now in the worst shape it has been since the Great Depression, Putnam  thinks “it’s not at all surprising that people are expressing very low levels of trust in government…Americans have always been a little skeptical about government. We historically have had a much smaller – and still do today – a much smaller government than most other countries at our stage in rate of development and so on. So it is true that Americans are a little more skeptical than most people in the world about government.”

While Putnam comments that it is hard for any government to overcome recession, mount a new health insurance effort, if the government succeeds, which he is fairly confident it will, the part in power will get credit for that.  “So I am not one of those who thinks that … we’ve entered some kind of dark hole in …which we spiral ever downward to lower trust in the government. I think we are in the midst of a perfect storm, but even perfect storms pass.”

Putnam’s takeaway from the Pew survey:

I think that the survey shows how big the hole is we’re in at the moment. And I do think that this level of distrust in government is a problem for all of us, actually. It’s a problem actually for even those of us who are, regardless of our political views, because we need government to get some basic things done, and it’s harder to get things done … when many of us don’t trust it.

[It’s also]… harder to motivate good workers….I’m not basically deeply pessimistic. I think that this is basically a decent country and that when government starts doing things demonstrably – I don’t mean just passing bills, I mean things start improving, the economy, people’s health care and so on, the government will get credit for it. And so I think this – at the moment, we’re in a particularly unpleasant downward vicious circle, but I think we can turn that around, and I think it’ll be good for the country if we do.

On partisanship: The increased partisanship “… is a serious problem. I think that’s a somewhat unrelated issue, but it is no doubt that…the degree of partisanship has changed enormously, even just over the last 10 or 15 years, and I think that’s bad for the country.”

On variation of trust from place to place: Depending on how good (non-corrupt, efficient) the local government is, in some places residents trust the local government more than the national government.  “Blacks, especially in the South before the civil rights movement, …had extremely low levels of trust in local government and extremely high levels of trust, extremely high levels of trust in the national government. That was not kind of something that was just in their minds, and it didn’t have anything to do with the particular actions about how they were treated at the post office. It had to do with the fact that local government was more racist, and the national government was less racist.”

Hear NPR Talk of the Nation story “What’s It Like to be a Government Worker” (4/19/10)

Growing Disapproval of Congress and government

(Photo by Lergik)

Gallup’s recent Ethics survey showed how low opinions of Congress have fallen.

In late August, a Rassmussen survey suggested that 57% of Americans would prefer getting rid of all Congresspersons and re-electing a new slate.

In a Pew survey from November, 2009: “About About half (52%) of registered voters would like to see their own representative re-elected next year, while 34% say that most members of Congress should be re-elected. Both measures are among the most negative in two decades of Pew Research surveys.”

Of course, there is always a strange discrepancy here:  Americans say that Congress is terrible, but most Americans think highly (or at least more highly) of their OWN representative.  [For example, a 2006 FOX poll found that 27% approve of Congress’ performance but 53% approve of their own representative’s performance.] And more than 90% of Congresspersons are re-elected each year.

Between 1980 and 1994 net ratings of own representative (% approve minus % disapprove) ranged from 40 to 60 points positive (with highs in 1984 and 1988). Net ratings of Congress ranged from 20 points positive to almost -40.  The trends in both net ratings (Congress and own representative) have been sharply down since 1988.  (See “Great Theatre: The American Congress in the 1990s.”)  See also recent NY Times poll (4/10) that showed 17% approving of Congress and 73% disapproving (or a net approval of -56); this was even stronger among Tea Party sympathizers where net approval of their representative was -9 percentage points and net approval of Congress was -95 (1% approved and 96% disapproved).

Since 1994, net approval ratings have fallen further.  For example, polls by Gallup and FOX in late 2008 had negative net ratings of Congress of -60 (generally with approval rates in teens and disapproval rates in the -70s).   For some of these trends, see here.  Net approval ratings of one’s own Congressperson fell to the high twenties or low thirties by 2006/2007 (in ABC/Washington Post polls).  But a most recent NY Times poll conducted of the general public (in conjunction with a poll on Tea Party sympathizers), found that 46% approved of the job of their representative versus 36% that disapproved.

How is it possible that most Congresspeople are highly rated by constituents but the collective body is poorly rated?  Few bad apples.  Everyone doing a relatively job of representing their constituents but relatively few putting national priorities ahead of their parochial interests.  Ratings are lower for individuals who they just don’t know.  Political parties as an institution are more interested in making other party look bad (to increase number of seats in the next election) than in getting things done.  Increasing role of special interests, PACs, lobbyists.  And the decline of the numbers of moderates in Congress (as articulated by Mo Fiorina and McCarty/Poole/Rosenthal) are decreasingly enabling Congress to find important middle ground.

And this is the graph over time of trust of government from Pew Surveys (darker blue line), which staged a resurgence from 1996-2001 but has been declining steadily since then, and is now at a near all time low.

Cynicize youth and they won’t care to vote

Two independent stories this weekend seem to have a common thread.  First the Washington Post article “White House Manual Details How to Deal With Protesters” (Peter Baker, p. A2, 8/22/07) discussed the Bush Administration’s protest manual and their “art of ‘deterring public protests’ at Bush’s public appearances around the country.”  Then the NYT over the weekend, in an article on the lack of public U.S. conversation about lowering the voting age, discussed that youth are not eager to vote.  There might just be a connection between the cynical Bush politics of “control and spin” — the above Bush manual to control dissent at campaign events, the history of patent lies from Bush officials, manufactured news under the Bush Administration that looked like it was independently reported but was actually purchased through contracts with journalists — and voter apathy (especially among young voters that are hoping for a government they can respect).

The NY Times story (“Sixteen Candles, but Few Blazing a Trail to the Ballot Box” (Week in Review, Pam Belluck, 8/26/07) notes that around 1971 a bunch of countries lowered the voting age (as the U.S. did) to 18. “[N]ow a handful of other countries are opening their polls to even younger voters. Last month, Austria became the first country in the European Union to adopt 16 as the voting age for all elections, joining Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua and the Isle of Man. Germany allows voting at 16 in some local elections. In Slovenia, 16-year-olds with jobs can vote. And the new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, just proposed a youth commission that would advise whether to let 16-year-olds vote, hinting that he is in favor. ”  [The NYT notes that Iran may be the only counter-example, raising the voting age from 15 to 18 in January as a way to help immunize the government against student protests.]

“Critics might offer lots of reasons for the United States’ not following suit — a lack of competence, maturity and experience among 16-year-olds tend to be the ones cited, as well as the argument that they, like 18-year-olds, wouldn’t use their franchise much anyway.

“Still, the United States is not without proponents of a lower voting age. Nine states allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries if they will be 18 by the general election. And in recent years, various vote-at-16 proposals have been made by lawmakers in New York City, Baltimore, Minnesota, Texas, Maine and California, where a state senator in 2004 proposed giving 16-year-olds half a vote in state elections, and 14-year-olds a quarter-vote.

“None of those proposals have advanced very far. But with another war on — and 17-year-olds able to enlist — as well as children growing up so quickly that they have MySpace pages before losing their baby teeth, supporters say that adolescents not only are competent to cast ballots, but would focus old fogies’ attention on issues relevant to children: health care, education, the environment, perhaps even a moratorium on Lindsay Lohan’s changing hair color.”

These advocates hope adolescents get “bitten by a civic bug” and counteract the fact that 18-24 year olds are the least likely cohort to vote.

“That’s the hope of Gale Brewer, a New York City councilwoman who has sponsored several attempts to allow 16-year-olds to vote in municipal elections…..Phyllis Kahn, a Minnesota state representative, said, ‘If we trust them to drive at 16, why don’t we trust them to vote?” and added that ”an irresponsible driver can do much more harm than an irresponsible voter.’ ”

While brain size peaks in humans at age 14,  Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, said adolescents were not ”mature enough to make voting judgments because they don’t have any historical perspective and they don’t have any comparable civic responsibility.”

And the article cites Matthew Crenson, professor of political science at John Hopkins who notes that few 16-18 year olds voted in Maryland in 2003 when a ‘scheduling fluke’ enabled some of them to vote in the Batimore mayoral primary for the first and only time as confirmation of the low level of interest of youth in politics.

Washington Post article was White House Manual Details How to Deal With Protesters (Peter Baker, p. A2, 8/22/07) which discussed the protest manual and the “art of ‘deterring public protests’ at Bush’s public appearances around the country.”  A NY Times Editorial on this was called Squelching the Citizenry’s Back Talk (8/25/07).   

And Washington Post had an editorial on Bush’s manual called “Don’t Read This Mr. President!” (9/10/07)

Also see: Sixteen Candles, but Few Blazing a Trail to the Ballot Box (NYT Week in Review)

Another proud moment in pork politics

The New York Times reports that Republican Rep. Don Young, Alaska, the representative infamous for getting millions earmarked for Alaska’s ‘bridge to nowhere’ is at it again, and this time to benefit his donors, not his constituents.

In a 2006 transportation bill,  he added a $10 million earmark to extend Conconut Road in Florida.  Obviously his Alaska constituents didn’t care about this, and even the representative from that Florida district didn’t want the road and the local Florida county voted not to use the funds.  The road money was inserted to pay back a developer-donor to his campaign who owns property adjacent to the site of the road extension who would see the value of his holdings rise. When Young “was approached near the House floor by a reporter, [he] responded with an obscene gesture,” according to the NYT.

More grist for the mill for the need for tighter campaign finance reform.

Thank you Rep. Young for helping to destroy trust in government!  May you get your just desserts for having the disrespect for tax funds that come from hard-working U.S. citizens.

Ethics Legislation runs into wall

Despite the Democrats making ethics reform in Congress a major issue, even passing weakened legislation is running into trouble as this NYT story details. [For example, Democrats have already abandoned a promise to double the current one-year lobbying ban when Representatives leave office.] Congresspersons are opposed to requirements that lobbyists disclose bundled contributions from different contributors — a practice that many lobbyists have used to curry political influence.

Perhaps relatedly, the Democrats voted down any censuring against their colleague Rep. John Murtha, who was alleged to have exchanged votes on legislation in exchange for earmarks. [Murtha is alleged to have threatened Republican Rep. Mike Rogers when  he exposed one of Murtha’s earmarks. Murtha’s alleged threat was as follows: “I hope you don’t have any earmarks in the defense appropriation bill, because they are gone and you will not get any earmarks now and forever.”  The NYT points out that Republicans were just as skilled at using earmarks to discipline those who voted against them or as a reward for party loyalty.

We hope that the Democrats can live up to their promises since ethics reform is an important brick in restoring Americans’ faith in Congress, and this cycle of campaign promises with little follow through (in both political parties) undermines voters’ confidence in government. 

A NYT Editorial (“The Hollow Promise Reform Act”, 5/23/07) castigates the Democrats.    They note: “For all the promises, the bundling disclosure mandate is in deep trouble as opposition mounts from Blue Dog, Hispanic and black caucus Democrats intent on protecting their re-election campaigns. The pity is that the proposal they are fighting doesn’t even stop this ethically indefensible practice — it merely puts the details on the record. ”  The NYT editorial also observes that the smarter moderates among the Dems “better keep their eyes on the people’s agenda, not the lobbyists’ A.T.M.’s. A crucial vote over the lobby bill’s debating rule is about to determine whether reform dies at the hands of greedy incumbents. They might remember that next year’s voters will check for enactment of last year’s promises.”

Not surprisingly, trust in government is only roughly a third of what it was a generation ago, when there were more political moderates interested in finding common ground,  less focused on scoring political points, and willing to rank important principles higher than their re-election.