Introduction

Abstract

Should we trust major American political, economic, and social institutions when the people associated with those institutions are fallible and even, on occasion, venal or criminal? Do they really operate as trustworthy tribunes of the people? The public is doubtful.It is well known that trust in American government, especially in Congress and the executive branch, has been declining since the 1960s and 1970s: a period of social ferment, movements for political and social change, an unpopular war, and major government scandal.2 What is less well known is that the erosion of trust seems now to have spread to many supposedly nonpolitical institutions, including business, journalism, science, police, religion, medicine, and higher education.3 Concern about the reliability and competence of these institutions is stoked by news stories-and, more recently, social media attention-reporting malfeasance on Wall Street, errors in the media, fraud and conflicts of interest among scientists, misconduct by police, abuse of children by clergy, conflicting advice from public health experts, and admissions scandals in higher education. Efforts as varied as vaccinating the American public against a raging virus, reforming police departments tainted by racism, validating a presidential election, and addressing climate change have been thwarted by distrust in institutions and experts.The consequences of lack of trust depend not only on the level of trust and the range of institutions over which it extends but also on the extent to which the fault lines of distrust map onto other political, social, and economic conflicts. In a democracy, political parties function to organize social and economic conflict and make it relevant for politics. The extent to which party competition in the United States involves not just division but distrust has varied across history, but partisan distrust goes back to the nation's founding and the emergence of our first political parties. Jeffersonian Democrats vilified and distrusted “big government” Federalist John Adams when he became president. In turn, the Federalists distrusted Thomas Jefferson once he was in the White House. The culmination of this long history, partisan polarization is currently at its highest point in at least a century.4Partisan polarization over the past half-century has produced significant mutual distrust between the parties. What is perhaps more surprising and more worrisome, the pattern of partisan polarization of trust now maps onto trust in many supposedly apolitical institutions, including those that purport to cultivate and disseminate knowledge and information, provide security and protection, and establish and uphold fundamental social and ethical rules and norms. Where once political partisans had the same level of trust in most nonpolitical institutions except for business and labor, Democrats are now more likely than Republicans to trust higher education, journalism and tv news, public schools, medicine, and science. In turn, Republicans tend to trust the military, the police, and religion more than Democrats do.Should declining trust and polarized trust in nonpolitical institutions cause concern? Do they portend widening ideological battles, an erosion of institutional legitimacy, an increasing propensity to second guess experts and authorities, and an inability to get things done in society? The development of a partisan divide in trust in nonpolitical institutions places additional hurdles in the path of productive public debate and successful public policy. Governing becomes much more complicated when closed communities that differ on facts, science, morals, the rules of society, and worldview fail to communicate with one another, much less agree on compromise solutions. And institutions embroiled in constant partisan battles are hard-pressed to carry out the tasks they were designed to do. In short, distrust anchored in partisan, institutional, and cultural conflict hampers our capacity to come together to meet common challenges and solve shared problems.Central to our concerns in this issue of Dædalus are what institutions do and why trust matters for their success.5 Although we can trace some governing, religious, military, medical, and educational institutions back thousands of years, the modern profusion and rationalization of institutions dates to the nineteenth century with the rise of corporations, universities, hospitals, public education, nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, and the professions in response to urbanization, industrialization, and specialization.6 Scholars tell us that institutions structure, facilitate, and regulate behavior in particular areas of economic and social interactions, among them business, law, religion, education, journalism, the military, medicine, science, and policing.7 In higher education, for example, there are formal rules and informal norms that vary across universities and across fields of inquiry that define appropriate ways of interacting with students, disclosure of conflicts of interest in conducting scientific research, treatment of evidence that disconfirms hypotheses, and recognition of the contributions of those who assisted with research. Similarly, policing has standards for the training of police officers, the methods used to patrol a city, rules for interacting with the public and with suspects, guidelines for the use of force, and review boards to examine force incidents. All institutions have special rules and procedures that order and discipline them so that they can provide goods and services to people in acceptable ways.For institutions to be successful, these rules, standards, norms, regulations, training methods, and procedures must be seen as legitimate both by the stakeholders associated with them and by the public at large. Legitimacy can stem from four basic sources, and different institutions rely on different mixes of them.8 Legitimacy may stem from the political system sharing its regulatory authority with an institution-such as the military, police, or a corporation-based upon government's power of coercion to defend the nation, keep the peace, and to enforce contracts. As long as the institution conforms to the rules established by the government, it draws legitimacy from its relationship to the government in the form of laws or charters. Legitimacy may also come from adherence to culturally approved and accepted meanings and logics that are shaped by what is culturally appropriate for each institution, for example, in the practice of medicine, religion, education, and science. It may reside in moral and normative beliefs about how those in institutions behave, for example, in professional codes of ethics for law, medicine, religion, higher education, and journalism. Finally, it may come from pragmatic authority based on efficiency and high performance in, for example, corporations, science, or banks.To be seen as trustworthy, an institution must be seen as legitimate in at least one, and usually more than one, way. For example, corporations are legitimate if they stay within regulatory frameworks and do not overstep their authorities by becoming monopolies or watering their stock; if they reflect the standard, culturally acceptable practices for a corporation within a particular society by producing products that conform to cultural models and address cultural needs; if they adhere to the ethical and normative standards for businesses not only by eschewing bribery and other illegal practices but also by treating their employees, suppliers, and customers fairly and ethically; and if they produce an economically successful product. Failing on any of these dimensions risks a corporation's legitimacy, and hence its trustworthiness. Universities must also stay within regulatory frameworks and be financially viable, but evaluations of them are based more upon their cultural acceptability as centers of teaching and learning and their professional standards: their adherence to norms of free inquiry, freedom of speech, and seeking truth. Religious institutions must be especially attentive to their cultural legitimacy and their adherence to ethics and norms. Each institution holds or loses legitimacy according to its own weighting and mix of criteria.Presumably, if an institution is trustworthy, then people are more likely to trust it, have confidence in it, and accept its advice and decisions as legitimate.9 They expect that it will do the right thing in an uncertain future with respect to weighty matters that range from protecting their health and safety to providing them with information about public issues.During the last three years, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and election controversies brought into bold relief the importance of institutions to our health and well-being. Lack of trust in government, medicine, science, police, and election administration has made it difficult to overcome a pandemic, resolve concerns about public safety, and settle issues regarding an election. While the essays in this volume explore these issues in assorted contexts, a central theme is the challenge to institutional legitimacy given the overall decline in the public's trust and the polarization of that trust between Democrats and Republicans-at a time when we most need expertise and institutional capacity to face crises as one nation.Our confidence in institutions is based upon both what we know about them and upon what we know about how they know what they know. Using insights gained from the field of science and technology studies (sts), Sheila Jasanoff's essay, “The Discontents of Truth & Trust in 21st Century America,” examines the relationship between knowledge and society. Her sts framework asserts that “it is not that expert institutions find and purvey truths from some ‘outside’ that exists independent of society.” Hence “standards of epistemic correctness do not stand outside of politics but are configured through the same processes of social authorization as political legitimacy.” The same four criteria that legitimate institutions-regulatory, cultural, normative, and pragmatic authority-also legitimate science and all knowledge. Despite the storybook version of science in which a better-performing theory bests an old one, in fact, what often matters are such preexisting cultural factors as scientific paradigms or even religious beliefs, such normative concerns as the prestige of a researcher or the status of the methods that are used, and even such factors as the relationship of the researcher or research institute to power.In order to develop commonly accepted knowledge, Jasanoff explains, societies develop “civic epistemologies,” which “are the stylized, culturally specific ways in which publics expect the state's [or an institution's] expertise, knowledge, and reasoning to be produced, tested, and put to use in decision-making.”10 Doing so involves meeting three challenges: representing problems in the world (like climate change and income inequality) in a way that resonates with those who are affected; aggregating disparate views from diverse sources and viewpoints to achieve consensus (or “objectivity”) about what causes these problems (such as emissions of greenhouse gases for climate change and technological change and tax policy for income inequality); and bridging to fill gaps between what is known and what is needed for problem-solving (for example, simulations to tell us how far greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to prevent a climate catastrophe, or economic models to indicate how to deal with income inequality). Jasanoff tells us that solutions to these problems, especially the aggregation problem, can come from three standpoints: “the view from nowhere (sanctioned by the methods of empirical science and quantitative analysis); the view from everywhere (sanctioned by inclusive representation and fair deliberation); and the view from somewhere (sanctioned by individual witnessing and moral authenticity).” Typically, combinations of these methods are needed in a social process that legitimates knowledge and decision-making, for example, through peer-reviewed research, expert panels, public hearings and comments, media commentary, commissions, and court cases.The remaining essays explore how well we have legitimated different institutions and the consequences of falling and polarized trust. In “Fifty Years of Declining Confidence & Increasing Polarization in Trust in American Institutions,” Henry E. Brady and Thomas B. Kent summarize the findings from fifty years of data from three repeated surveys that asked about “confidence” in the institutions or the people running them: the Gallup Poll, norc‘s General Social Survey (gss), and the Harris Poll. Together, these surveys provide information from 1972 on for four political institutions-the presidency, executive branch, Congress, and the Supreme Court-and for sixteen nonpolitical institutions: those associated with the economy such as business, banks, Wall Street, and organized labor; those related to knowledge and information production, including the press and tv news, television, public schools, education, higher education, and science; those enforcing norms and standards such as the police, the military, and religion; and those providing professional services such as medicine and law.11The drop in confidence in political institutions over the past fifty years has been especially pronounced for Congress, significant for the presidency and the executive branch, and more modest but real for the Supreme Court. Less well known are the declines in confidence in nonpolitical institutions. As with the political institutions, the declines have not been uniformly steep. Comparing the period from 1972 to 1979 with the period from 2010 to 2021 shows that average confidence has decreased for fourteen of these nonpolitical institutions, stayed the same for one (science), and increased only for the military. In most cases, the decline proceeded relatively steadily over time. Wall Street, tv news, banks, and the press sustained the most substantial deterioration in confidence-comparable to that for Congress. For public schools, medicine, television, business, and religion, the drop in average confidence was more moderate-comparable in magnitude to those for the presidency and executive branch. The decline in average confidence was even smaller for law, education, and the police-roughly equivalent to that for the Supreme Court. There were still smaller declines for higher education and labor.In effect, nonpolitical institutions have moved from being trusted quite a lot to being trusted only somewhat. On a four-point scale with responses of “a great deal of confidence,” “quite a lot,” “some,” and “hardly any at all,” in 1972–1979, the American public expressed “quite a lot” of confidence in thirteen nonpolitical institutions. Just three institutions (labor, law, and television) inspired only “some” confidence. By 2010–2021, only six institutions - the military, science, higher education, police, education, and medicine-still enjoyed “quite a lot” of confidence, and ten institutions warranted just “some” confidence. Recent data suggest that Americans probably have only “some” confidence in higher education as well. Thus, Americans have gone from believing that thirteen of sixteen institutions deserved quite a lot of confidence to believing that only five of sixteen merit a lot of confidence, with eleven deserving only some confidence.Substantial increases in partisan polarization of trust have accompanied the significant declines in trust. In the 1970s, only business and labor showed significant polarization, with Republicans trusting business more than Democrats, and Democrats trusting labor more than Republicans. By the 2010s, assessments of every nonpolitical institution except banks were more polarized-with Republicans especially likely to trust police, religion, business, and Wall Street, and Democrats more trusting than Republicans of tv news, press, labor, television, and public schools.Considering all the nonpolitical institutions in which trust has fallen-except for Wall Street, banks, business, and labor-shows an interesting pattern.12 Confidence among partisans of the currently less-trusting party dropped especially precipitously, while the confidence of the other, more-trusting party either declined only slightly or even increased somewhat. In the one case in which trust among partisans of both parties and independents has increased-the military-the result is largely driven by the substantial increase in confidence among the partisans of the more trusting Republican Party. The changes in trust for the four institutions related to the economy are about the same across the two parties, with little change in trust for labor but significant declines for Wall Street, banks, and business. Finally, confidence among political independents is either lower than that of both Democrats and Republicans or between the levels for the adherents of the two parties. The declines in trust among independents track quite closely those for the entire population.These data reveal several different patterns of change for nonpolitical institutions. In some cases, changing confidence in a particular institution may be linked to a large-scale event with society-wide consequences; for example, across individuals and groups, a war might affect confidence in the military, or a financial crisis might diminish confidence in banks and Wall Street. In other cases, individual life experiences might have implications for confidence in a particular institution; for example, being the victim of police harassment or the victim of a crime might influence trust in the police. In a quite different pattern, a set of general nonpartisan forces-affecting independents especially strongly-produces an overall decline in trust in almost all nonpolitical institutions. Although different groups, including different party groups, vary in their initial levels of confidence in various nonpolitical institutions, such forces operate more or less uniformly across groups to diminish confidence in institutions. In a still different pattern, there is a partisan interaction. A set of factors leads to a decline in trust among members of one party or the other, depending upon the institution, resulting in polarization in confidence. The forces at work probably interact in complicated ways, and to understand what is going on, we must consider both the multiple forces that have led to a secular decline in trust and those that have led to partisan polarization of trust.These changes are worrying, but are these data capturing something real? In her essay “Trustworthy Government: The Obligations of Government & the Responsibilities of the Governed,” Margaret Levi expresses concern about the meaningfulness of survey responses. Answers to questions about confidence in government may simply reflect which party is in power, with supporters of the in-party evincing trust and those of the out-party expressing lack of confidence. This criticism seems quite relevant for trust in government, but it is hard to see how it applies to trust in ostensibly nonpolitical institutions. More to the point, Levi worries that responses to survey questions are not behaviors, just attitudes. She prefers to look at protests, compliance with laws, and other behavioral manifestations of lack of confidence.13Our authors provide abundant evidence that confidence in institutions has behavioral consequences. Brady and Kent show that lack of trust in an institution is highly correlated with an expressed unwillingness to have kin or friends pursue a career in or marry someone associated with that institution.14 C. Ross Hatton, Colleen L. Barry, Adam S. Levine, Emma E. McGinty, and Hahrie Han demonstrate that lack of trust in science was related to unwillingness to follow public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that greater trust in local government was associated with willingness to follow local public health dictates. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway argue that distrust in science is associated with rejection of policies to address climate change. Tracey L. Meares indicates that increasing trust in the police “is a better, more efficient, and lower-cost way to achieve crime reduction and law compliance.” Robert Wuthnow shows that trust in religion is a concomitant of church attendance. Max Margulies and Jessica Blankshain find that a proxy for trust-namely, “warmth toward the military”- is positively correlated with willingness to increase defense spending, to use force abroad, to employ more bellicose military strategies, and to evaluate wars positively. In short, survey data appear to be capturing something that is very real.Whatat then are the general factors that cause changes in trust for institutions? In his essay “What Does ‘Trust in the Media’ Mean?” Michael Schudson focuses on the centrality of changes in journalism, arguing that declines in trust follow from increasing journalistic skepticism about government and other institutions over the past fifty years. The pivotal moment was the Watergate scandal of 1972 to 1974-the years in which our data begin-that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Schudson tells us that “Journalism has changed substantially at least twice in fifty years, and the technological change of the early 2000s should not eclipse the political and cultural change of the 1970s in comprehending journalism today.” Through studies of media content, Schudson documents the turn from “who-what-when-where” reporting to “how” and “why” reporting in which “skepticism is approved, encouraged, and taught.” He even implicates colleges and universities. More journalists (and more of the public) have a college education, which encourages criticism and skepticism. Furthermore, nonprofit organizations, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and the internet facilitate continuous monitoring of actions by government and other institutions. Schudson's diagnosis is a counterpoint to that of Jasanoff. If becoming trustworthy requires the development of civic epistemologies, then journalism's current mode may undermine these efforts through its constant exposure, criticism, and complaint.Lee Rainie considers the role of the internet in his essay “Networked Trust & the Future of Media.” The decline in trust and polarization of trust began in the 1970s and 1980s before the internet and social media had become part of American life. The internet began to take off in the mid-1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web, browsers, multiplexing, and fiber optic cables. About 50 percent of Americans used the internet in 2000, half had broadband by 2007, half used social media by 2011, and half had a smartphone by 2013.15 Although levels of trust began to erode in the 1970s, survey data suggest that, for many institutions, acceleration in the decline in trust and increase in polarization of trust took place at various times between about 1997 and 2020, as the internet became increasingly significant. Watershed events-among them, impeachments, 9/11, the rise of the surveillance state, prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Tea Party, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter movements-also affected trust, but each was also in part shaped by the growing importance of the internet.According to Rainie, the internet matters because “every decision a person makes about who or what to trust is a social calculation” so “there is deep intersection between changes in information and changes in social arrangements.” Consequently, “in the age of social media, the members of users’ personal and professional networks are key conduits of civic information and serve as key commentators on that information.” Perhaps because of the creation of these new and less familiar social networks and the concomitant damage to the media from the internet's cannibalizing of its advertising, “Americans believe the civic information ecosystem is collapsing” and public confidence in social media is very low. Almost two-thirds of the American people believe that social media has a mostly negative effect on where the country is going, and three-quarters of Americans believe that political partisans do not operate in a shared reality or shared moral universe.Still, it is worth noting, as our authors observe again and again, that broad expressions of distrust in major institutions get at only part of the truth about trust. As Rainie notes,Robert J. Blendon and John M. Benson, meanwhile, tell us that, while Americans distrust medicine, they trust the nurses and doctors with whom they interact. And Charles Stewart iii remarks that voters trust their local election administration.Declines in trust may also follow from the actions within specific institutions that violate one or more criteria for legitimacy. In “Religion, Democracy & the Task of Restoring Trust,” Wuthnow paints a vivid picture of how religious institutions have been compromised by corruption and scandal precisely because they are the arbiters of moral virtue, and he discusses attempts to repair lost trust through confessions, independent advisory commissions, and litigation. None of these is entirely effective as “insincere confessions [are] staged for media consumption,” investigative committees produce “toothless reports that languish in bureaucratic darkness,” and litigation “drags on for years before inconsequential penalties are levied.”Meares, in “Trust & Models of Policing,” notes that despite their instrumental effectiveness in crime fighting, the police are distrusted by Black adults, which she traces to a history of injustice against African Americans. In their essay “Race & Political Trust: Justice as a Unifying Influence on Political Trust,” Cary Wu, Rima Wilkes, and David C. Wilson argue that trust depends upon perceptions of fairness and social justice and that, given their history, racial and ethnic minority groups judge institutions through that lens:Blendon and Benson suggest that, even though the public trusts doctors and nurses, the high cost of health care is a source of distrust in the medical system. In January 2020, before COVID, the public's top two domestic priorities among a list of twenty-two possibilities were lowering the cost of health care and reducing prescription drug prices-objectives shared by Democratic and Republican members of the public. In parallel, declining trust in higher education seems to be related to high costs.In their essay “Specific Sources of Trust in Generals: Individual-Level Trust in the U.S. Military,” Max Margulies and Jessica Blankshain explore trust in the military through five Ps, which are closely related to the four criteria for legitimacy: performance, professionalism, persuasion, personal connection, and partisanship. They find some evidence for performance in wars affecting trust, but “the performance hypothesis has a hard time explaining the gss high point for post-97 11 military confidence in 2018.” The military gets very high marks for being ethical and professional, but it is not clear how this assessment has driven trust ratings over time. Positive depictions of the military in film and on television suggest that persuasion may help to explain confidence in the military, but the evidence is not definitive. Personal connections to the military are strongly related to confidence in the military. Once again, however, the impact on trust in the military over time is not clear. There are generational differences in confidence in the military, but the most substantial gap is between Republicans and Democrats.In “Trust in Elections,” Stewart finds two paradoxes in trust for election administration in 2020. The first is that while the “procedures to ensure the trustworthiness of elections held” and “Americans were more confident in the electoral machinery following the 2020 election than they were in 2016,” Americans were also more polarized than ever before. Using data from 2000 to 2019, Stewart finds that a relatively consistent 20 to 40 percent of Democrats were very confident that “votes nationwide were counted properly” (with upticks after Democratic wins and downticks after Republican wins). In contrast, the share of Republicans who were very confident that votes were being counted properly sank from 60 percent in the aftermath of the contentious 2000 election, in which George W. Bush ultimately prevailed, to less than 20 percent in 2018. Moreover, after Biden's victory in the 2020 election, while 60 percent of Democrats were very confident that votes had been counted properly, only 10 percent of Republicans shared this view.The second paradox is that, regardless of party affiliation, voters are about 20 to 30 percentage points more likely to say that their own vote was counted correctly. These results suggest that different dynamics drive these two measures, “one based upon direct experience, and the other mediated by political elites.” We see similar patterns for other institutions in which closeness matters: doctors and nurses who provide medical care are trusted, but not the medical system; local governments are trusted but not the federal government; experience in the military or personal acquaintance with someone in the military increases overall trust in the military.How and why does partisanship affect trust? It is easy to see why partisanship would be related to trust in government in the American system, in which the American presidency-the most visible symbol of the government-combines the role of head of state with partisan policy-maker, but it is harder to see why it should be associated with trust in nonpolitical institutions. One possible link is through partisan political campaigns