Trust in American Institutions
Our guest doe episode 98 is Henry Brady, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy. He talks about the decline of trust in American institutions. Henry explains that trust in key sectors, such as the military, media, and higher education, has been steadily eroding since the 1970s, influenced by events like the Vietnam War, Watergate, economic inequality, and political polarization. He discusses how different events and historical contexts have led to varying levels of trust in these institutions, noting that while trust in the military has fluctuated due to wars and national crises, trust in other institutions has generally declined due to broader societal changes.
He also examines the growing polarization of trust along party lines, with Democrats and Republicans displaying contrasting levels of trust in institutions like the media, police, and higher education. This polarization complicates efforts to address institutional reform and governance, making it harder to find common ground. He emphasizes how declining trust affects daily life, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, where mistrust in public health institutions led to widespread misinformation and vaccine hesitancy.
Henry highlights the role of economic inequality in eroding trust, arguing that rising inequality and increasing diversity have fostered a sense of distrust and division among Americans. To rebuild trust, he advocates for stronger local media, improved civic education, and initiatives like citizens’ assemblies that encourage dialogue and understanding across divides. He also emphasizes the importance of addressing systemic issues to build trust at a societal level, suggesting that focusing on fairness, institutional performance, and civic engagement is key to fostering a more trusting society.
As the discussion concludes, Henry reflects on the challenges facing young researchers studying trust. He suggests that while there is some understanding of how to build trust on an individual level, more research is needed on how to foster trust on a larger, societal scale. His insights offer a thoughtful exploration of the complexities surrounding trust in American democracy and potential strategies for rebuilding it.
Trust in America’s Institutions
Trust has actually declined in almost every institution except the military, which is very interesting, and small business, which has always been beloved by Americans. That’s not to say that trust in corporations has not declined, it has certainly declined. So what factors, well, one is the possibility that we’re just a more educated nation, and educated people tend to be more distrustful of the things about them. That’s part of what we teach them in higher education. Another thing is, is that the 1940s 50s and 60s, and that’s the baseline, we start in 1970s actually asking about trust. It might be that the 40s, 50s and 60s were unusually trusting period in American politics because of the World War II, because of us getting out of the Great Depression, because of, frankly, an unusually good time for American workers. And then that was in the 1970s, suddenly we hit a period of Watergate and other scandals and religious institutions, corporations, banks and so forth, bank failures that were quite well publicized and quite devastating to some people. We have a fractious media that we didn’t used to have, there’s technological change, which has been going at a very brisk rate, especially with the internet, but with other things as well. And then finally, we have polarization in our politics, which seems to be the result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and also just the fact that politicians are more and more playing to what we call cultural issues instead of economic issues. And on those issues, there are really strong divides in the American electorate. So putting all those factors together, that may explain why we have a decline in trust, although none of them alone seems to be enough, and it probably is the ensemble of all of them that have really contributed to the decline in trust.
Connection between social trust and political trust
We know there’s a connection. We don’t actually know that much exactly how it works, but it seems quite likely that if you don’t trust other people that you’re not going to trust institutions. But the causality probably goes both ways. It’s probably if you don’t trust institutions, you’re less likely to trust other people. And so that therefore the two are mutually reinforcing in terms of downward spirals, which is what we’ve got these days. And that’s very worrisome. Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone wrote about this, about the lack of bridging capital, this is situations where you have people who actually bridge across divides and can tell you that, in fact, maybe you should trust people on the other side. We have less and less of that. We have more and more anonymity in a lot of the ways we operate in this society and I think that’s very worrisome. We certainly have that with respect to the media, they’ve done experiments where they brought people together, they talked about issues, they really agreed on a lot of things, they seemed to be getting along. And then they went back and they had a listserv where they could discuss the issues. And literally within half an hour to an hour, they were starting to call each other jackbooted fools, because the anonymity of the internet and of posting things can somehow lead people to forget about the other. And yet, when we’re in a room with somebody who’s the other, we feel that we have to somehow, as human beings, get to them, talk with them, understand them, and we do that. So the anonymity is a real problem.
The rise of fragmented media and misinformation
Well, when I was young, there was three big media outlets in America, ABC, NBC and CBS, and they all were voices of authority, and they all pretty much came up with the same story about what was going on in America. There were downsides to that. That meant that you didn’t hear alternative perspectives. So the good news is that we probably get more alternative perspectives now. I listen to MSNBC, which is a left leaning organization, CNN more or less in the center and to Fox News, which is a right wing leaning organization. And I find that I learn by listening to everybody. But what’s really problematic is that what we’ve lost is something that used to exist through the media. What the media did is they mediated information. There were editors of newspapers, there were editors of television shows. They would ask the journalists, can you really prove this? Do you have more than one source? Do you have several sources? Have you authenticated it with information that’s reliable and believable? None of that happens in social media, where you learn from somebody who is a self-proclaimed authority that X, Y, Z or something else is true. But maybe it’s not true at all. Maybe it’s completely fabricated. And so there’s no mediation of the information that we get. There’s just straight from the source, which may be totally unreliable. And so that’s one of the big problems we have today, we have an overload of sources of information, many of which are probably bogus and we have very few institutions that can mediate, edit and authenticate that information.
Publications Henry Brady
He has written on electoral politics and political participation, social welfare policy, political polling, political polarization and trust, and statistical methodology. He is coauthor of Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) which won the Harold Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) which won the Philip Converse Award for a book making a lasting contribution to public opinion research and the American Association for Public Opinion Research best book award, Expensive Children in Poor Families: The Intersection of Childhood Disability and Welfare (2000), Counting All the Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States (2001), and The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (2012). He is co-editor of Rethinking Social Inquiry (2004) which won the Sartori Award for best book on qualitative methods, Capturing Campaign Effects (2006), and the Handbook of Political Methodology (2008). His most recent book is Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the New Gilded Age (2018).
Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2003 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006.