All right we are three nations

 I had a post in late 2016 about confidence in various institutions, using annual data from the Gallup poll going back to the early 1970s.  It's been almost five years since then, so I decided it was time for an update, but while I was looking up the latest data, I saw a recent report from Gallup that gave confidence by ethnicity (non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Hispanics).  Whites have historically had the most influence on those institutions and the top leadership continues to be overwhelmingly white, so you might expect whites to have the highest confidence overall, blacks the lowest, and Hispanics in the middle.  But that's not the case:  across sixteen institutions, the average having "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence is 31% among blacks, 33% among whites, and 41% among Hispanics.  

Of course, the pattern is different for different institutions.  Looking first at economic institutions, four of them (banks, large technology companies, organized labor, and big business), show what I'll call the standard pattern:  Hispanics have the highest level of confidence, black and white lower and about equal.  For example, 28% of Hispanics, 19% of blacks, and 14% of whites express high confidence in big business.  One economic institution is different:  more whites have confidence in small business (74% vs. 56% for Hispanics and 55% for blacks).

The three political institutions are more complicated because confidence depends on the perceived political direction.  For example, blacks had more confidence in the presidency than whites, but less confidence in the Supreme Court.  Presumably that's because we have a Democratic president and a Supreme Court that's mostly Republican appointees.  But Hispanics had the highest confidence in two of the institutions (Congress and the court), and were tied for first on the other (presidency), so it seems like the standard pattern of high confidence among Hispanics holds here as well.  The results for Congress are particularly striking--31% of Hispanics and only 6% of whites had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence.  

Turning to other institutions, the standard pattern holds for three:  the criminal justice system, organized religion, and the public schools.  A notable feature of schools is the size of the gap--50% of Hispanics have high confidence, compared to 28% of both blacks and whites.   For the medical system and newspapers, there's little or no ethnic difference--all are 40-45% for the medical system and 20-25 for newspapers.  For police and the military, confidence is highest among whites, lowest among blacks, with Hispanics in between (unsurprisingly, the black-white difference is much larger for police than for the military).  TV news has a distinctive pattern--highest confidence among blacks (28%), lowest among whites (13%), with Hispanics in the middle (21%).  That's the only institution for which blacks have the highest confidence.  

For quite a while, people have been talking about the possibility of Hispanics moving towards the Republicans, and in the last couple of years, there's some evidence that it's starting to happen.  These results may shed some light on that possibility--you could say that Hispanics are more conservative in the traditional sense of having positive views of the central institutions of society.  However, contemporary conservatism has a negative view of many institutions--and the few institutions that they they like (small business, the military, police) are more popular among whites than Hispanics.  So going by confidence in institutions, it seems like Hispanics are a better fit with the Republican party of 20-30 years ago than the Republican party of today.