Decline and fall, part 5

 To conclude this series of posts, I'll discuss two points:  the distinctive pattern for confidence in organized religion, and deviations from the trend of declining confidence--that is, periods of relatively high and low confidence in institutions.

   1.  Confidence in organized religion comes close to a pure linear decline--the correlation with a time trend is -.924.  That's the strongest of any of institution with data going back to the 1970s.  Why?  It seems likely that people who aren't very attached to organized religion will have less confidence, and there are substantial cohort differences in attachment to religion.  Therefore, cohort replacement produces a relatively steady downward trend.  Religion also doesn't have short-term changes in performance, or apparent performance, the way that the economic and political institutions do.

2.  In my last post, I mentioned that there were some periods when confidence in institutions declined more rapidly (e. g., the early 1990s) and others where it remained steady or even increased (e. g., the late 1990s).  I said that economic conditions seemed to be part of the explanation, but not the whole story.  I think the other major factor is general confidence in government--that's there's a sort of halo effect in which confidence in other institutions rises or falls depending on whether people are relatively contented or discontented with government and politics.  The reason is that politics is usually the focus of media coverage, so the popular sense of whether "things" are going well or badly is influenced by political developments.   I've previously written about an index of general confidence in government and politics constructed from the American National Election Studies.  Here is is, updated through 2020:

 

 And here is a scatterplot of confidence in government and relative confidence in institutions starting in 1976, the earliest year for which data on both are available (in some cases, I had to estimate confidence in institutions by taking the average of two years, like 1975 and 1977 to give the 1976 estimate.

 

 A pretty strong correlation except for 2020, when confidence in institutions was high relative to confidence in government.  I think that was because people rallied round institutions in reaction to Covid, but didn't rally around government.  But as I mentioned in an earlier post, even in the first three Trump years, there was a slight rise in institutional confidence rather than a decline.  That could be a result of good economic conditions--despite all the turmoil in politics, things seemed to be going pretty well in people's daily lives.

 

Decline and Fall, part 4

 My original post on this topic found that confidence in most institutions had declined since the 1970s, although at different rates.  The military was an exception--confidence had increased.  There were also several institutions for which data only went back to the 1990s, but had no clear trend since that time (police, criminal justice, small business).  The updated figures don't change any of those conclusions, but they suggest that there are some deviations from the trend--periods when confidence in most institutions declines more or less rapidly, and sometimes even increases.  I'll focus on that in this post.  

First, I fit linear trends for each institution, and took the residuals from those regressions.  Then I did a factor analysis for the ones that had long stretches of data (religion, military, Supreme Court, schools, Congress, labor, big business, banks, and newspapers).  Everything except organized religion and the military had substantial loadings on the first factor.  That is, confidence (relative to the trend) in the other six tends to rise and fall together.  That gives a general measure of confidence in institutions going back to 1979.  If you omit banks and newspapers, you also get estimates for 1975 and 1977.  This figure shows the two estimates

The lines are smoothed estimates, to highlight the pattern more clearly--there's no statistical rationale for the degree of smoothing, it just matches my impressions pretty well.  I mark a number of high and low points and a few other years.   The rises and falls seem have some connection to economic conditions--relative low points in 1981 and 2008 correspond to deep recessions.   But as I've mentioned a number of times, there seems to have been a general mood of discontent in the early 1990s that's hard to explain from economics (there was a recession in 1992, but it was mild).   The relative improvement in the late 1990s continued into the early 2000s, even after the economy slowed down, and then there was a substantial decline before the 2007-8 recession started.  Another interesting point is that confidence held up after 2016, despite lots of things that might have been expected to undermine it.  

That leaves two exceptions, the military and religion.  When I say that the military is an exception, I don't just mean that it has a different trend, but that the ups and downs relative to the trend are different.  For the period for which data on the police and the criminal justice system are available, their deviations from the trend correspond pretty well with those of the military.  That is, there seems to be a general factor of confidence in the institutions that use force that's different from confidence in most other institutions (the other institutions for which shorter spans of time are available, like small business or TV news, go along with the general confidence measure).  

Then there is organized religion.  As shown in my last post, confidence in organized religion has declined steadily in the 21st century, while most institutions have held steady or improved in the last ten years or so.

This post has been mostly summary--my next one, which will be the last on the topic, will focus on interpretation--what might explain these ups and downs, and why is organized religion an exception?

Decline and fall, part 3

 More institutions:

The first two, from the 1970s, asked about "medicine."  I think that could account for the difference--to me, "medicine" suggests treatments, while "the medical system" adds administration (or maladministration) and finance.  If we set aside those two early surveys, there's no definite trend.  There was a big jump in 2020, and confidence was still pretty high (tied for second in the period since 1990) in 2021.  It's interesting that confidence was higher in 2020, before the vaccine, than in 2021. 

A downward trend in the last decade, in contrast to many other institutions.  The figure for 2020 was particularly low--that survey was taken just after the killing of George Floyd.  It was higher in 2021, but still lower than in any year before 2020. 

A similar pattern, at a lower level.

For schools, there is a strong downward trend, but it seems to have leveled off in the last decade.  There was a big jump in 2020, presumably because people were sympathetic to their efforts to deal with the pandemic.  Confidence was still fairly high by recent standards in 2021, despite widespread criticism of school policies, especially delays in returning to in-person instruction.  

For organized religion, there has been a definite decline in the 21st century.  There was a jump in 2020, but 2021 was back to the second-lowest level ever.

Finally, the big exception:

Over the whole period, confidence in the military has increased--it's the only institution with a clear positive trend.  But there has been a decline in recent years--confidence in 2021 is at the lowest level since 2007.  Given Donald Trump's efforts to involve the military in his attempt to remain in office, and the military's efforts to avoid that, it would be interesting to see a partisan breakdown.

OK, that's the data.  My next post will try to say something about the general patterns and what they might mean.