A Loss of Faith in Government

Government, the “output” side of democracy, is composed of the institutions that are supposed to
carry out our collective wishes. For as long as America has been a republic, there have been lively
debates at all levels of society over whether government harms or helps community. Some
conservative critics have argued that government can, and routinely does, undermine patterns of
mutual assistance and reciprocity. Thus, they maintain, less government would stimulate more
civic-mindedness and stronger social bonds. Liberal commentators, conversely, have argued that
government powerfully spurs voluntary activity, both by helping to spark and sustain associations
and by creating the background conditions, such as health and income security, that allow
individuals the luxury of contributing to the wider society.
There is truth to both the liberal and conservative positions. We agree that government, with its
vast resources and coercive powers, at times can threaten social capital. The 1950s  “slum
clearing” projects are a regrettable memorial to the damage that government can inflict on our
stocks of social capital. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that government
provides real incentives for social capital formation: examples range from the government’s
funding of the Cooperative Extension Service (which spawned 4-H clubs and spurred rural social
capital building) to the government’s support for national and community service programs
nationwide. Because government has the potential both to deplete and to build our stock of social
capital, the challenge for government in this new century is to increase the ratio of building to
depleting.
Americans have always been ambivalent about their government. On the one hand, we tend to
agree with Winston Churchill’s famous quip “democracy is the worst form of government, except
for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
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 That is, we express high levels
of confidence in our  system of government. And we are surprisingly satisfied with specific
components of the system. The vast majority of us like our member of Congress and solid
majorities express confidence in the military and the police.
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 As long as the economy is strong,
we usually approve of our President. What’s more, in a recent  “customer satisfaction” survey,
Americans gave high ratings to the service they received from scores of government offices,
ranging from the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food program to the Social Security
Administration to the National Park Service. Indeed, the headline-grabbing study found that
customer satisfaction with the federal government was nearly as high as with the private sector.
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On the other hand, generalized trust in government has plunged to previously unimaginable lows.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, about three-quarters of Americans agreed that you can trust the
government in Washington to do what is right always or most of the time, but by the 1990s, that
fraction had dropped to less than a third.
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 The fraction agreeing that  “quite a few officials are
crooked” increased from about 25% in the late 1950s to about 45% in the mid-1990s.
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 The
fraction of Americans who have confidence in Congress has never exceeded 41% since 1975, and
the confidence score since 1991 has averaged 22%, irrespective of which party was in control.
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While trust in government ebbs and flows with economic conditions, after the mid-1980s
government trust continued to fall amid a soaring economy, and even our recent unprecedented
boom has failed to reverse the decline of the previous two decades.