Kennedy School researchers ask why we've lost faith in government

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Polls show that people's confidence in government has declined drastically since the early 1960s.

The percentage of Americans who say they trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time has gone from 75 percent in 1964 to 25 percent in 1995.

And the trend is global. Polls in Canada, Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Ireland have produced similar results. Around the world, people are more cynical about their leaders and institutions than they have been for many years.

Scholars at the Kennedy School of Government have been studying this phenomenon, and recently the first results of their research have appeared in a new book.

Why People Don't Trust Government was published last month by Harvard University Press. Comprising a dozen essays by Harvard professors (including Ernest May, the Charles Warren Professor of American History; Derek Bok, the Three Hundredth Anniversary University Professor; Richard Neustadt, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government Emeritus, among others), the book was edited by three members of the Kennedy School faculty: Joseph Nye, the Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School; and Philip Zelikow and David King, both associate professors of public policy.

Nye's hope is that the book, aimed at "policymakers, journalists, and serious students of government," will help to raise the level of discussion about this worrisome and amorphous issue.

"I'd like it to get people to think more carefully about government and avoid some of the simplistic cliches that are now current in the public debate," he said.

In fact, it was just those simplistic cliches in the wake of the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City that got Nye thinking about the problem of declining trust in government.

"That was my personal inspiration," he said. "I was struck not only by the horrendous nature of the event itself, but also by the confused nature of the debate that ensued. It was at that time that I was pondering the question of whether to leave government and become Dean of the Kennedy School. That confusion about what was happening to government was certainly one of the incentives I had to take over the deanship."

One of the first things Nye did upon leaving his job as assistant secretary of defense and returning to Harvard was to launch "Visions of Government for the 21st Century," a major project designed to examine and debate the role of government in the next century. Why People Don't Trust Government is the project's first major contribution to that debate.

In the book's introduction, Nye clears the ground by eliminating some of the popular hypotheses that have been used to explain people's growing distrust of government. Saying that government has grown too large cannot be regarded as an adequate explanation, for example, since during its period of greatest growth (mid-1930s to mid-1960s), the federal government remained quite popular. Moreover, areas of the government that have grown rapidly, such as Social Security and Medicare, have enjoyed widespread support.

Nor does the assertion that it's all been downhill since Vietnam and Watergate stand up to scrutiny. Not only did those two national convulsions happen an awfully long time ago to plausibly affect the attitudes of Americans today, but, in fact, the decline has not been a steady one, writes Nye. People's confidence in government brightened during the early part of the Reagan administration, a phenomenon that casts into doubt the theory that government still languishes in the shadow of that earlier shame.

If these pseudo-hypotheses ring false, then what is the real explanation for contemporary mistrust of government? Nye sees it as part of a larger trend.

"I think the message is that there are some long-term secondary changes which are reducing confidence in all institutions, so that government, like these other institutions, is swimming upstream."

These changes include things like the development of post-materialist values, observable in many advanced industrialized nations where the security created by a rising standard of living seems to heighten people's critical faculties.

Another important change is the growth of a more cynical and intrusive media that tends to erode the respect that public figures and institutions once enjoyed almost as a given.

Another change is the role that television has come to play in politics, driving up the cost of political campaigns and shifting the focus away from hand shaking and stump speaking to projecting a carefully crafted image through mass media. In Nye's words, "More politics is done wholesale rather than retail."

Politicians themselves are at least partly responsible for the public's mistrustful attitude, Nye points out. Ever since Jimmy Carter, presidential candidates have run "against Washington," suggesting with greater or lesser vehemence that the federal bureaucracy is a foetid swamp needing to be drained, Nye adds.

One anomalous finding of the study is that the public's dissatisfaction does not extend to all branches of government. Certain federal institutions still enjoy widespread approval, including the military and the post office (particularly surprising in view of Cheers' Cliff Claven, Seinfeld's Newman, and the adoption of "going postal" into the language).

The popularity of these institutions seems to depend, at least to some extent, on advertising. The post office has taken increasingly to advertising as it has faced competition from private delivery companies and from e-mail. The military, especially since abandoning the draft, has used advertising as a part of its recruitment efforts, coinciding with a general effort to confront problems such as racism and drug use and to enhance educational advantages for recruits.

Apparently, by improving the images of these institutions and sharpening their "brand recognition," advertising has won them greater public support. And as long as this image enhancement reflects real achievements, Nye does not regard it as a bad thing.

"It's unlikely that Congress is going to appropriate massive advertising budgets for other government agencies, but to the extent that those agencies can improve their services and let the public know about those improvements, I think it could have a positive effect."

Although Nye regards Why People Don't Trust Government as the most thorough and serious exploration of the issue so far, he sees the book as only one contribution to a more extended dialogue, and one in which he hopes the Kennedy School will play a major part. The effort will included forums, more scholarly studies, and outreach programs, which will in turn feed back into the School's curriculum.

"I see it as something the Kennedy School has to do," said Nye. "We have to know how government and public service are changing so that we can train leaders for those positions. I regard this not just as an interesting project, but one that is central to our mission."