Chicago Booth Review Podcast Does Anyone Trust Washington?

Sam Peltzman: It's very clear there's a break in this process in the early 1990s at which continues. If you compare the reaction of Democrats to Trump and Republicans to Obama, it's very similar.

Hal Weitzman: Trust in American institutions is at an all time low, but nowhere has trust eroded more than in political institutions. 60 years ago, 75% of Americans trusted the government to do what is right. Today is just 20%. What happened? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Sam Peltzman about his research on American attitudes towards government. When did we lose faith in our political leaders and which parts of the population are driving the decline? Sam Peltzman, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Sam Peltzman: Thank you. Pleased to be here.

Hal Weitzman: We're delighted to have you back again, and we seem to have a lot of these similar conversations, which is about what's happening to American attitudes or behaviors over time. This time we're here to talk about trust and your research on trust. Now, in the early 1960s, three quarters of Americans trusted the government to do what is right. That sounds so quaint. Today it's 20%. When did this downward slide begin?

Sam Peltzman: Very soon after the 1960s. The late 1960s. We have the best continuous series of answers to these kind of questions from the early '70s, and it's been down for the 50 plus years since the early 1970s.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. Remind us where you get your data from.

Sam Peltzman: Mostly from the general social survey. You can't go back before 1970, but there are other surveys that give broad hints that there was a golden age when everybody trusted the government and also themselves.

Hal Weitzman: Amazing to think about nowadays, isn't it?

Sam Peltzman: Yes. Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Do you think, so let's think '60s is Vietnam, '70s is Watergate, et cetera. I mean, what's your feeling about what might have driven this?

Sam Peltzman: Well, that started it. But the interesting thing to me is that the decline was fairly gentle for the first 20 years of that period. It's only since 1990 that we really have had a profound decline in trust across the government, executive branch and Congress in particular.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Yeah. And there's something different, isn't there, that you found about political institutions? So trust is down across a lot of institutions, right? Banks, the media, religious institutions, but you observe that the decline in political trust is exceptional. How exceptional is it?

Sam Peltzman: By the early '70s, you had an even division between people who had a lot of trust in the government and people who had no trust even. Today, it's about 10 to one on that dimension. I count the difference between the people who say they have a lot of trust and the people who say they have no trust. There's a big chunk in the middle say, "Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't." I give them a zero, kind of a neutral. So we have a net negative number, which is-

Hal Weitzman: That's what you call net confidence, is that right?

Sam Peltzman: Yes. Yes. And in terms of Congress, it's about minus 50 on my scale. And that's driven by 10 times as many people saying they have no confidence at all compared to this rump that says, "Yes, I have great confidence in the government." It's almost disappeared, that last group.

Hal Weitzman: Who are the rump? Do we know who they are or how old they are?

Sam Peltzman: The first thing to say about that is this decline is extremely broad. There's no large demographic that's exempt from it. Some demographics are less susceptible to it than others. So you would have, for example, low education, there are racial divisions that would soften it. So low education and non-whites would have a softer decline. They would be probably overrepresented in the group that still has a lot of confidence and underrepresented in the group that has little.

Hal Weitzman: So the more educated you are, the more distrustful you are of the government?

Sam Peltzman: At the very top, no. But as you go from high school dropouts up, it does increase.

Hal Weitzman: What's happening at the very top?

Sam Peltzman: At the very top, again, a little moderate. It's really among the high school graduates, the people who have a few years of college where the real decline has been most profound. People highly educated, a little bit. But we're in a society where the average guy you run into on the street just doesn't trust these basic institutions.

Hal Weitzman: Unless you live in Hyde Park in Chicago, where-

Sam Peltzman: Yes, that's right. There may be bubbles here and there.

Hal Weitzman: ... the average guy in the street is a Nobel Parish winner.

Sam Peltzman: When you say that the group that has great trust in the government is 5% of the population, you are after all talking about 15 million people, and they do tend to be concentrated in certain areas.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So you find that trust in the executive branch specifically is heavily tied to partisanship, which makes a lot of sense. If I'm a Democrat and my guy is in White House, then I trust the institution more, I guess. But you also introduce a concept called asymmetrical increasing partisanship, AIP.

Sam Peltzman: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Wonderful.

Sam Peltzman: That sounds like some technocratic-

Hal Weitzman: You're going to tell me it's something very simple. What is it and what-

Sam Peltzman: It's really very simple. First of all, it's not true that when a Democrat's in office, the Democrats have great trust in the government. They have neutral. So they're like back in the 1970s where we start. Back then, you didn't have partisanship in this.

Hal Weitzman: In the same way.

Sam Peltzman: So if you had the Ford administration, if you asked Republicans and Democrats, "Do you trust the Ford administrator?"

Hal Weitzman: And Ford was a Republican.

Sam Peltzman: 50-50.

Hal Weitzman: Just to remind us, Ford was a Republican.

Sam Peltzman: Ford was a Republican, succeeded by Carter, a Democrat. You ask the same question. This is what this survey does. It just asks the same question over and over again over time. The Democrats would've had confidence more in Carter who was a Democrat than Republicans, but the margin was unimportant. Again, what's interesting is this is the state of affairs until the early 1990s comes the Clinton administration and you start seeing a great divide. The divide is asymmetric. It's not that the Democrats jumped up and said, "Oh, wow, we have this great..."

They remain pretty neutral, 50/50, a little bit more because he was a Democrat, but just a little. The Republicans start expressing great distrust start. So the partisanship widens a little bit. Now, if you average the Republicans and the Democrats, you begin to get a decline that you really see in the data.

Hal Weitzman: And the question is, do you trust the executive branch?

Sam Peltzman: Yeah, which means the people who are running it, which means the president and also his cabinet, the people he appoints and so on.

Hal Weitzman: So they're not specifically asking about the institution of the president.

Sam Peltzman: They're not asking about... It's do you trust the people who run the executive branch? So it's a mix. Do you trust the people and do you trust the way they're running this institution? So it's a mix and it's much more personal of the executive. Much more who is the president that's driving this, but in this asymmetric way, and this increases over time. So now if you think about where is this process going, you begin to see a decline when you average across all the political variety that we have, because one group is starting to distrust whoever he is. It's either a Republican distrusting a Democrat, and that continues once the Republicans take over in the early 2000s, then we get a switch, but it's asymmetric. It's the Democrats who now are withholding their trust in increasing numbers and the Republicans who are kind of, they're okay, but it's 50/50. That's just increased and increased and increased by the time you get to Trump, who's my last reading in what you've...

Hal Weitzman: The first Trump administration or-

Sam Peltzman: The first one, yes. Yeah. I decided to stop with COVID, but I have more data on this. If you want to discuss post COVID, we may come to that post COVID stuff later on, but it's widening with Obama in terms of Republican distrust and widening again with Trump, with Democrat distrust. So you get this asymmetric process, where if your own guy's in office, it's okay. But if the other guy's in office, it's increasing distrust. And when you average, it's increasing distrust.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, I can imagine though, Sam, somebody listening to this saying, "Yeah, but it's Trump. I mean, it's-"

Sam Peltzman: It's not Trump. That's what I'm-

Hal Weitzman: Well, in the sense of-

Sam Peltzman: It goes back to Clinton.

Hal Weitzman: ... he's such an unusual president.

Sam Peltzman: Yes, yes, yes. But he's not unusual on this dimension, which is interesting to me. I mean, if you look back to guys like Clinton or Bush, they seem kind of centrist figures given what we have today.

Hal Weitzman: Now, yeah.

Sam Peltzman: Yeah. After all, Clinton ended welfare as we know it at great political cost from his left. Still, it's very clear there's a break in this process in the early 1990s, which continues. If you compare the reaction of Democrats to Trump and Republicans to Obama, it's very similar. Now, I only have one year on Trump and we're getting more. We actually don't have anything on Trump until this year. So bring me back in a couple of years if I'm still around. And we can discuss Trump.

Hal Weitzman: It would be interesting to know, because one sense is that because he's unusual, while he might provoke more distrust among Democrats, one might think that he would provoke more trust among his base. So that would be interesting to look at.

Sam Peltzman: Didn't happen in the one shot that I have at this, but we'll see.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Entitled, and it's about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and law professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what's the matter with rights. Sam Peltzman, in the first half, we talked about your research on trust in the US political system and how the growth of mistrust, I guess, that's the thing that's really driven this, isn't it? There's been a big growth in people distrusting the president, and that's what's driven this partisan, or as you called it, asymmetrical increasing partisanship, which is a phrase I'm going to be using all the time now. So my friend, Sam Peltzman, told me about this. But what about Congress? Because we've been focusing on the presidency, but it turns out that Congress is even less trusted.

Sam Peltzman: Yes. Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Tell us about that.

Sam Peltzman: The reason for it is what you just said. The difference is driven by the group who have still 50/50 trust of the president, because he's their own guy. You have the same thing in Congress qualitatively, in that when there's a Republican Congress, there's more Republican trust, but it's much weaker. And therefore, the factors that have been eroding trust are much more widespread across the political and ideological spectrum. You see just essentially both parties. I say both. We actually have three parties now. The independents, they start out interestingly, even in the '70s as the most cynical or distrusting, and the rest of the world just catches up with them as the partisan world kind of catches up with them.

Hal Weitzman: So talk about the decline in trust for Congress. Is it that Congress was trusted and its declined faster or was it never as trusted as the presidency?

Sam Peltzman: They were about the same. It was as trusted as the presidency throughout. If you took out the partisanship, which is much stronger on the president's side, if you took that out of the equation, it would be the same. The people who distrust really distrust and the group that trusts is tiny, as I said, it's one tenth of those who distrust as we sit here.

Hal Weitzman: And so, you said if you take out the partisanship, then they're pretty much the same.

Sam Peltzman: That's in the data.

Hal Weitzman: Which is interesting. So I mean, because unlike the presidency, as you said, decline in trust for Congress is uniform across the political party.

Sam Peltzman: Not uniform, but much more so-

Hal Weitzman: More uniform. Okay.

Sam Peltzman: ... than the Presidency.

Hal Weitzman: So does that tell us that American's frustration with Congress is about the institution itself? It's not just about politics.

Sam Peltzman: There is a clear difference in institution and people here, because this isn't hardly original with me, but we keep voting for the same people, returning them to Congress.

Hal Weitzman: Well, because my sense is that people say, "Well, I like my guy, but everyone else there is a moron."

Sam Peltzman: You can look at it as either optimistic or pessimistic. The optimistic view is that it's cheap talk. I mean, if you distrust Congress, why don't you throw your guy out? It's just a lot of hot air. The pessimistic one is that there's a deep problem with the institution. They really do like their guy or gal, but there's a real problem with their doing anything. There's a feeling that they just can't do anything.

Hal Weitzman: Right. So you've referred earlier to some of the groups that you've analyzed, you've sliced and diced these data, right? And I noticed that the decline in trust is steeper for older white respondents. Is that right?

Sam Peltzman: Yes. Yes, that's true. The older part of it has-

Hal Weitzman: People are a little bit like you and me.

Sam Peltzman: Well, I'm old and white, yes. Very old.

Hal Weitzman: I'm just old.

Sam Peltzman: Not very, but really old.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. But tell us what you found about older white respondents.

Sam Peltzman: Well, I don't want to get into the technical term, but the old people are different in this sample. If you go back to the beginning, the old people were people who grew up in that golden age, where everybody trusted everything. Today's old people grew up in Watergate. They grew up in a period in which things have been deteriorating and they reflect that. So the flip side of that is the younger people don't have that historical experience of respect then deterioration.

Hal Weitzman: So what does that mean?

Sam Peltzman: Well, the future, we don't know. The future will either be that the young people will come more cynical with time or that they really are a little bit more trusting than their elders and that the trust will turn up going forward.

Hal Weitzman: What about the Supreme Court? Because the Supreme Court is an institution that has, by many people's perception, has been politicized increasingly over the decades.

Sam Peltzman: Okay. Well, here I'm going to have to get into more recent data.

Hal Weitzman: Sure. Please.

Sam Peltzman: Up to COVID, the Supreme Court was an exception to this, which is a mystery. The politicization didn't start in the 2015 to 2020 period. It started in the early '90s, but the Supreme Court is net positive. It's declining a little bit, but stays comfortably net positive on my... Meaning there's more people who have a lot of trust in the court than people who have little trust, until COVID. Since then, the Supreme Court has joined the other two branches. There was a sharp, really sharp deterioration that occurred during COVID, and it's even more local than that. It's somewhere in late... It's '21, it was still holding up. '22, it goes to hell. It's now distinctly negative. It's not as bad as the Congress and the presidency, but clearly the gap closed tremendously. And don't ask me why.

Hal Weitzman: No, I'm just wondering-

Sam Peltzman: Nothing happened.

Hal Weitzman: ... but COVID was a significant event then on our sense of trust in government?

Sam Peltzman: Not in government. Only in the Supreme Court.

Hal Weitzman: Only in the Supreme Court.

Sam Peltzman: Congress, presidency, yeah, they declined, but they've been declining for 50 years. So that decline continued. I mean, you're at a point with Congress, where it really can't continue much. There's nobody left who has a lot of trust.

Hal Weitzman: Our expectations are so low.

Sam Peltzman: Yes. Yes, it has no place to go but up.

Hal Weitzman: But now we've lumped the Supreme Court in.

Sam Peltzman: Yes. Yes. Not completely, but we're moving in that direction or we have. I don't know if that trend will continue. It's a very open question and a somewhat important open question.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And you say, I shouldn't ask you why, but you do say in your research that it's not about ignorance. People know what's going on in Washington.

Sam Peltzman: Well, they have opinions. So if you're... In my part of economics, we have a concept called rational ignorance. It just doesn't pay for you to spend a lot of time parsing data like I've been doing. You can't really influence the outcome of an election. So you vote on your emotions or you want to make a performance, you want to tell your friends, "Hey, I voted for this person."

So that's called rational ignorance. If you're rationally ignorant, you say, "Well, I like this guy a lot. I like that guy a lot."

And it all averages out and there shouldn't be any particular tilt, but they're clearly... It's not just that there's a tilt, but that it's been changing, so that people's perceptions have been changing. That doesn't to me at least bespeak rational ignorance. It may speak ignorance in some sense, but people think they have enough information to form strong beliefs. They're given a middle choice. You can say, "Well, sometimes I trust them and sometimes I don't. Depends on the issue."

But increasingly they're taking extreme positions on this and negative extreme positions. So there's something going on where the average person, who really isn't investing a lot in generating the information, is processing it in a way which comes up with strong negative views.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, Sam, always great to talk to you even about a topic as somewhat depressing as this. Always entertaining to have you on the podcast. Thanks very much for coming back.

Sam Peltzman: It's my pleasure.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis and insights, visit our website, chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.