An old-fashioned cure for fading trust in government

ACROSS much of the industrial world, trust in government is low and declining.

- By Clive Crook

Why is this happening and why, exactly, does it matter? An unusually thorough new study looks at these questions and finds answers that are somewhat unexpected and, in one way, more disturbing than you might have guessed.

The fact of diminished trust is hardly a revelation, least of all in countries such as the US, where anti-establishment populists have turned politics upside down and elite expertise has become not just distrusted but disdained.

Last year a survey found that fewer than one in six Americans expect Washington to do the right thing “nearly always” (1%) or “most of the time” (15%). At the turn of the century, such measures for the US were more than twice as high. Across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, many other countries (including the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, New Zealand, and Chile) have also seen trust decline. But in others (such as Finland, Ireland, Portugal, and Mexico) trust has increased. Levels of trust, as opposed to rates of change, also vary a lot. These widely differing patterns make it possible to examine causes.

On the face of it, the collapse of trust seems like a phenomenon of social psychology — a perspective that tends to highlight a confluence of cultural and technological factors. Social media, disinformation and misinformation, echo chambers, epistemic bubbles and whatnot are often taken to be responsible.