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.