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?