The latest round of Gallup data on confidence in institutions is out. Confidence is down across the board, with especially large declines for the Supreme Court and the presidency. Gallup also reports the breakdowns by party identification. Republicans have most confidence in small business, the military, and the police, and least in newspapers, Congress, and the presidency; Democrats have the most in the military, small business, and the presidency, and the least in the Supreme Court, big business, and Congress. I wanted to see if the pattern had changed, so I looked up the 1999 data. (Small business was not included in the 1999 survey). Among Republicans, the relative position of different institutions was very similar in 1999 and 2022, with a correlation of 0.93. There was more change among Democrats, with a correlation of only 0.59.
The correlation between Republican and Democratic confidence in different institutions fell from .66 in 1999 to .29 in 2022. The gap between parties increased, with the average absolute difference going from 10.5 to 19.5. The figure shows the partisan gap (absolute value of percent Democrats approving minus percent Republicans approving) for individual institutions.
The diagonal line indicates identical values in the two years: for example, in 1999 43% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in TV news, for a difference of 12, and in 2022, 20% of Democrats and 8% of Republicans did, again giving a difference of 12.* The partisan gap has stayed about the same for criminal justice, big business, Congress, banks, the military, organized labor and TV news, and grown for the Presidency, police, schools, the Supreme Court, organized religion, the medical system, and newspapers. It seems that confidence in "the presidency" has become more closely linked to feelings about the current president--37% of Republicans had confidence in the presidency in 1999, down to 12 percent in 2021 and only 2 percent in 2022. Democratic confidence in the Supreme Court has declined dramatically, from 57% in 1999 to 13% in 2022. But the change is not symmetrical: Republican confidence has also declined, although by not nearly as much. Democratic confidence in the police and organized religion has declined, while Republican confidence has stayed about the same; Republican confidence in newspapers has declined, while Democratic confidence has stayed about the same.
Republican confidence in schools stayed about the same until 1999, but has declined since then, including a drop from 20 to 13 percent from 2021 to 2022. Democratic confidence has remained about the same over the period. With the medical system, confidence declined among both Democrats and Republicans from 1999 to 2009--since then, it's continued to decline among Republicans but increased among Democrats. I wonder if that is because of the Affordable Care Act? Finally, Republican confidence in organized labor was slightly lower in 2022 than in 1999, despite their growing interest in being a "working class party," or at least talking about being one. (Democratic confidence was almost unchanged).
Both the decline in the correlation between Democratic and Republican ratings and the rise in partisan gaps can be regarded as a decline in consensus or a growth in polarization. The changes in the gaps for individual items are interesting, and I may look at some of them in more detail in the future. But the point that I find most striking is the much greater stability of rankings among Republicans. One reason for that was that the changes among Republicans were more uniform, and another one was that Republican lost more confidence in institutions that they already disliked. In contrast, some of the biggest losses among Democrats were for institutions in which they had fairly high confidence in 1999 (Supreme Court, organized religion, the police).
*The decline among Republicans is larger in percentage terms: about 75% compared to about 50%. You could adjust for that by using logits, but that doesn't change the general conclusions, so I stayed with percentages in order not to make things more complicated.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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