Exploring Our Trust Deficit

A preliminary look at some General Social Survey data

Since the election, I keep returning to the problem of the breakdown in institutional trust and the challenge that creates for any sense of small-d democratic political life.

In this morning’s Washington Post, Karen Tumulty wrote of her recent interaction with outgoing Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. In their discussion, he outlined the problem.

“Workers have slowly migrated out of the Democratic Party,” he told me. “It accelerated as more and more jobs were lost. And I still heard [about NAFTA] in this campaign, especially in the Miami Valley, Dayton, where we still won, [and] up there in Mahoning Valley, where we didn’t win.”

Workers came to view Democrats “as a bicoastal elite party,” he explained. “We were too pro-corporate. They know Republicans are going to shill for corporate interests. They expected Democrats would stand up for them, and they don’t see that nationally.”

This resonates with the themes I keep exploring. For example, back on November 18 (my 70th!) I wrote about the Robert Putnam documentary on Netflix. I wrote:

As Putnam argues, there are many factors that have broken our social bonds. Economic inequality is key, especially when the cost of living is high. Social media consumption and balkanized news sources make things worse. We don’t really know our neighbors, much less strangers.

A few days later, I wrote about the problem of mistrust in institutions. I shared data that Gallup gathered in June regarding seventeen US Institutions. The news wasn’t good, to say the least.

All but three institutional areas have more than one in five respondents saying they don’t trust those institutions. Two of those, small business and police, are local entities. Over four in ten have very little trust in the presidency, the criminal justice system, newspapers, big business, television news, or congress (at a whopping 57%).

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I’ve spent some time over the past week trying to examine both of these trends. I recently restarted my Stata subscription to finish some analysis for a project I did for the Englewood Review of Books. Downloading the 2022 version of the General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center (thanks to the Association of Religion Data Archives!), I was able to look under the hood of the institutional trust questions to see which subsets of the population had the highest levels of distrust. (I know it’s nerdy but this is what sociologists do with our time!)

Putnam and General Trust: To begin to get at the Putnam thesis about loss of social capital, I explored the question of whether people in general can be trusted. The responses in the GSS were “yes”, “no”, and “it depends”. I did some elementary cross-tabulations to see how subgroups varied. Across the full sample given this question (1,116 individuals), just over 25% said “yes”, just under 9% said “it depends”, and nearly 66% said “no”.

There is a gradual increase of the percentage saying “no” in every subsequent generation. Gen Z respondents were nearly 30% more likely to say you can’t trust people than their great grandparents. This is consistent with the surprising election results for Gen Z.

The problem is replicated in self-reported social class. Nearly 85% of lower class people said that people couldn’t be trusted compared to just under half (alarming in its own right!) of upper class individuals. Each generation shows the same kind of progression from lower class to upper class with two exceptions. The Silent Generation generally hovered right around their overall average with just under half saying “no.” At the other extreme, all members of Gen Z were over 70% “no” regardless of social class.

The same pattern obtains with regard to educational level (obviously correlated with social class). For those with less than a high school degree, 85% said “no”. For graduate degrees, the percent falls to 41%.

In terms of religion, there is little difference between those who claim to be Born Again and those who don’t. However, the Born Again are 8% more likely to say “no” (70% to 62%.).

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Institutional Trust: The GSS asked questions similar to those in the Gallup survey mentioned above. They asked about confidence in thirteen institutions: the military, business, religion, education, the executive branch, the supreme court, organized labor, congress, medicine, the press, science, and television. Some of these areas show pretty high consensus either positively (the military, science, medicine) or negatively (the executive branch, congress, and the press). I focused primarily on attitudes toward major business companies, especially given the role perceptions of economics and inequality factored into the election.

The respondents were asked if they had a “great deal”, “only some” or “hardly any” confidence in the institutional areas. Among 2,700 respondents, just under 15% said “great deal”, 63% said “some”, and 23% said “hardly any”.

I used some of the same subgroup variables as above. I paid particular attention to the “hardly any” option. Among the Silent generation, only 16% chose this option and 66% said “some”. On the other hand, the “hardly any” option was selected by 32% of Gen Z with only 51% saying “some”. There is a sizable jump in “hardly any” for millennials and Gen Z compared to Silent and Boomers. This is not surprising given the economic conditions in which they came of age.

The social class differences are far more modest, with lower class respondents only 8% more likely to say “hardly any” than upper class respondents (29% to 21%). The interaction between social class and generation has some interesting patterns. Social class doesn’t make a lot of difference among the Silent and Boomer generations. Starting with Gen X, there is an increase in the “hardly any” choice among lower classes. This class distinction only gets stronger among Millennials and Gen Z.

Education doesn’t make a lot of difference in attitudes toward business. There is a small difference between those who are Born Again and those who aren’t (the former are 4% more likely to say “hardly any”).

There are likely other predictor variables that might help us uncover precisely where the challenges with social trust and institutional confidence might lie. This is a key step to move beyond simply decrying the current conditions and formulating strategies on how to change them.

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This is my last post for 2024. I’ll pick up again on January 3rd. Hope you all have a great Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, or whatever holiday you prefer. See you on the other side.