Decline and fall, part 1

 About five years ago, I had a post on confidence in various institutions.  My basic conclusion was that confidence in most of them had declined since the 1970s, but there was one big exception:  confidence in the military had increased.  Data on small business, the police, and the criminal justice system only went back to the 1990s, but confidence in those institutions seemed to be holding steady (although confidence in the criminal justice system was quite low).  A lot has happened since then, so I am updating the post.  I'm also going to try to go beyond talking about general trends and look more closely at the timing of ups and downs (mostly downs).  With 15 institutions, that means a lot of data to look at, so I will do it in several parts.  

I'll start with political institutions:

I use colors to distinguish the last few years:  the blue dots are the period through 2016; red is the first three years of the Trump administration; green is the first Covid year, and lavender is the fist year of the Biden administration.  The surveys are taken in May or June, which is important to interpreting the figures for some years. 

 

There is a lot of short-term change, which is clearly related to approval of the current president.  But confidence seemed to rise in the late 1990s, and then fall in the first decade of the 21st century.  Surprisingly, it seems to have inched up in the last few years--the level in 2020 was the same as in 1996.   So it doesn't simply track presidential approval.  

 

Confidence in the Supreme Court was steady until about 2002 (with maybe a period of higher approval in 1984-8), and then declined.  But as with the Presidency, it seems to have rebounded a bit from a low point in the early 2010s.  That is, the Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett controversies don't seem to have hurt the court's reputation--or maybe partisanship has become so strong that whatever hurts among supporters of one party helps among supporters of the other.  

 

Even Congress, which has found the secret of uniting Democrats and Republicans in disapproval, has rebounded a bit from its 2014 low.  It also had some improvement in the late 1990s, despite a government shutdown and the unpopular effort to impeach Bill Clinton.  Still, the overall trend is clearly downward (the correlation with time is -.88).  

I'll next turn to the media.

People were asked about newspapers only twice in the 1970s, 1973 and 1979.  The 1979 figures were much higher than 1973 or the next survey in 1981.  I'm not sure what to make of that--a lot of institutions got high scores in 1979, but I remember the public mood then as pretty disgruntled.  Since the 1980s, there's been a clear downward trend, but there was some increase in the late 1990s.  There may have been some increase in the last few years--at any rate, there hasn't been a clear decline.  This is interesting, since many observers (especially but not exclusively on the right) claim that people lost confidence in the media during the Trump years as many journalists moved away from their traditional efforts to appear neutral.  

The question on TV news only goes back to the early 1990s.  Since that time, the decline has been quite steady.  In the last few years, confidence in TV news has been consistently lower than confidence in newspapers.