Trust And The Economy

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Distrusting Government: As American As Apple Pie

(Excerpt)

by Ari Shapiro

...

When trust in government is high, those in power can pass sweeping initiatives, like President Johnson's Great Society program. But Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, argues that distrust can be valuable, too.

"It's important in a democracy for people to say, 'Well, yeah, I want to keep an eye on you,' " says Nye, who edited Why People Don't Trust Government with Zelikow. "If you have complete trust and it's not warranted, then people in power can get away with all sorts of things."

Trust in government was very high when President Johnson said he was withdrawing from Vietnam while he was, in fact, escalating. And trust was high leading up to Watergate.

Trust And The Economy

Nye also cautions that Americans' behavior reflects a higher level of trust in government than their responses to polls suggest.

"Look at the IRS statistics on whether people are cheating on their taxes: That hasn't changed. Look at filling out census forms: That hasn't declined significantly. Look at something like voting behavior, which goes up and down" with no correlation to poll numbers reflecting trust in government, says Nye. So Americans may actually have more confidence in government institutions than they are willing to admit to pollsters.

The measure that most strongly correlates with polls charting Americans' trust in government is the state of the country's economy, according to Eric Uslaner, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"When was trust in government high? At the end of World War II, when we had an economic boom," says Uslaner. "The next time trust in government was really high was the 1960s, when we had another economic boom."

So if government officials want to regain the public's trust, they might listen to advice from another past president whose campaign slogan famously was, "It's the economy, stupid."

http://www.npr.org/t...oryId=126028106