Since the 1970s, the Gallup poll has asked people about how much confidence they have in a variety of institutions. The 2022 Gallup data has recently come out, and I will write about it soon. But today I will write about a different series of questions on confidence, from surveys sponsored by the Pew Research Center. The general form is "How much confidence, if any, do you have in each of the following to act in the best interests of the public?" [Institution]. Why look at these questions, when the Gallup series covers a much longer period of time? One reason is that they consider a different group of institutions. Another is that they are taken at irregular intervals, unlike the Gallup surveys, which are taken every June. As it turns out, one of the Pew surveys was carried out in April 2020, in the early stages of the Covid pandemic; another in May-June 2020, when George Floyd was murdered and a wave of protests began; and another in late November 2020, just after the Presidential election. As a result, the Pew surveys make it possible to look at the impact of these events.
The Pew surveys regularly asked about scientists, medical scientists, elected officials, religious leaders, principals in public schools, journalists, police officers, business leaders, and the military. Possible answers were "A great deal of confidence, a fair amount of confidence, not too much confidence, no confidence at all": I counted these as 4,3,2,1 and computed the averages. I show these groups together because people had high confidence in all.
Principals have a similar pattern, although they are higher in April 2020, which may may indicate that people came together to support schools in the early stages of Covid. Data for police starts only in 2018--there has been a steady decline since then.
Finally, two groups with low confidence: elected officials and journalists.
The question about journalists wasn't asked until January 2019--there has been a steady decline since then. Elected officials follow the more common pattern--higher in the Trump presidency, at least the later part, but then declining between November 2020 and December 2021.
In November, I had a post using the Gallup data that also showed a general rise after 2016 (going through June 2021). The general point that emerges from both analyses is that confidence in a variety of institutions tends to rise and fall together. There's no way to be sure about what drives it, but I think that a combination of economic conditions and general satisfaction with politics are the most likely sources. People often suggest that confidence in particular institutions mostly reflects the performance of those institutions. For example, today's column by Ross Douthat said that confidence in science and public health experts has declined in the last few years because the "expert community" has departed from neutrality and allowed political goals to influence their recommendations. There are certainly examples of that, but most people don't pay that much attention to the news, so things like the "Open letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic" don't have much impact. In contrast, when prominent politicians saying that everything you've been told is wrong, even people who don't follow the news closely are likely to be aware of that.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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