Hating the Feds

The recent plane crash into an IRS building by a man angry at the federal government over taxes brings into sharp relief what Americans think about the feds.

A Gallup Poll last month had the "federal government" with the highest negative score of several institutions, beaten only by the vague and abstract "socialism."  "Small business" did best, followed by some vague abstractions like "capitalism."  Asking over time what's the biggest threat and given three choices (big government, big labor, and big business), a USAToday/Gallup poll finds big government improving by comparison and big business becoming the bad boy of the three.  No doubt this is a bailout/recession effect.

You can find these numbers here.

Another way to view distrust in the federal government is below, a graph taken from the American National Election Studies data.

The trend line obviously increases, drops a little during the 1980s, then begins a slow rise during the partisan 1990s but begins a curious turn downward, perhaps in part caused by 9/11.  What I don't have here is the line from 2006-2008 data, which I suspect inches downward again.  But that's just a guess.

Moral Values Double!

The percentage of people who say the moral values in this country are excellent has -- doubled! Okay, it's gone only from 1 percent to 2 percent. Well within the margin of error, and kinda embarrassing.

Gallup asks: "Thinking for a moment about moral values: How would you rate the overall state of moral values in this country today -- as excellent, good, only fair, or poor?"

The latest numbers from May 5-10 have 2 percent saying "excellent" and it gets worse and worse after that: 15 percent "good" and 37 percent "only fair" and 45 percent "poor." For you math majors, that leaves 1 percent "unsure" what moral values are, why they're being asked about them when they have better things to do. In 2008 there were 2 percent saying "excellent" and years after that, just 1 percent.

"Poor" has steadily increased over the years, from 40 to 45 percent, pulling about the same from the other two categories of "good" and "only fair." Not sure what that means other than movement toward the extremes of the scale, which is a bit unusual methodologically but may be a function of growing partisanship. Dunno.

What people know about the moral values of the nation is partly a function of the media, partly what they deal with in their daily lives. Celebrated moral disasters can tweak the national numbers in a fairly consistent direction, but there's usually a recovery. The individual stuff is impossible to predict and I'd think personal experiences cancel one another out.

Does this stuff matter? Like trust in major institutions, the answer is yes. There needs to be some reservoir to draw on when things get tough -- trust, perception of morality, all the bits and pieces necessary to draw people together to meet a challenge, be it the economy or anything else. Everyone doesn't have to be trusting. There are the cynical, or the fashionably cynical who haven't really earned the right to be yet, but like the poor those folks will always be with us. We also need that reservoir of optimism, and that's something that's always been there in the U.S., though less so now than perhaps several decades ago.

Confidence in Major institutions

I'm always a sucker for surveys and one of my favorites is tracking people's confidence or trust in major institutions such as Congress, the military, the press, and all the rest. You can tell a lot about the whims of public opinion by examining them over time.

Using Harris poll data drawn from here, let's look at a few.

The Press. Of course I start here, being a journalism guy. Since 2002 the press has seen a high of 16 percent saying they have "a great deal of confidence" to a low of 2009, where it sits at 12 percent. Still, that's probably within the margin of error. There's also a category for Television News and the latest number was 22 percent. It's bounced around the 20 mark for several years.

Colleges and Universities. Gotta go here too given that a major university pays my salary. This has actually gone up from a low of 33 percent with "great confidence" to 40 percent this year. Woo woo! We rock.

Wall Street. Oh what a beating Wall Street has taken, so it's no surprise that the richies have dropped from 19 to 4 percent of people having great confidence. Four percent? That's the lowest of any of the 16 institutions examined. Even Congress, which has slipped to 9 percent from a high of 22 percent.

Organized Religion was at its lowest in 2002 but now is at 28 percent. Not bad.

Overall, most major institutions have seen a drop in confidence over time. This is nothing new. I remember in graduate school reading a textbook, The Confidence Gap, that discussed the trend from the 1970s as trust in major institutions slowly eroded (in part a Watergate effect, in part Vietnam, in part everything else).

Coincidentally (not really) I am working on a research paper that examines trust in government and how being a winner or loser in an election affects your trust. Lots of people have mined this territory, including a couple of professors of mine in grad school, but I'm taking a different twist that, as far as I can tell, no one has explored yet. More when I get the blasted thing actually finished, but basically I'm looking at winners and losers and whether or not you expected to win (but lost) and how that may lead to even less trust. And there's media stuff there too. Sigh ... if I finish grading, maybe I can get back to it.