A tale of two columns, part 1

 In his final column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman talks about a change from when he started writing it in January 2000:    "What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people . . .  were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment."  He observes that this isn't just dissatisfaction with politics:  "It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis."  This statement includes a link to Gallup data on confidence in institutions; I've written about them before, but time has passed and more data have accumulated, so this seems like a good occasion to revisit them.

Has there been a general decline in confidence over the 21st century?  The figure shows the average adjusted for changes in the list of institutions they asked about*:

Opinions in 2000 were more favorable than opinions today, but less positive than they'd been in the 1970s.  On the other hand, they were more favorable than they'd been in the early 1990s, so someone looking back in 2000 might have said that there had been a decline, but we've turned things around and are on the way up.  Now it looks like the increase in the 1990s was a temporary interruption in a long decline.  

What could account for the changes?  One possibility is changes in general outlook:  people may have become less "deferential"--less likely to give institutions the benefit of the doubt and assume that their leaders are competent and well-meaning.   You would expect this to be a gradual change depending mostly on generational replacement:  it couldn't account for the upward movement in the 1990s or the rapid decline in the last few years.  What relevant factors might change over a shorter time period?  One possibility is the performance of institutions:  for example, in a column  that appeared a few days after Krugman's, Bret Stephens said "So many things in American life feel broken. Our public schools, which keep getting more money even as they produce worse outcomes."   Another is partisan politics:  political figures influence public opinion because they get a lot of media coverage and because people know whether they are generally aligned with their point of view.  So if prominent politicians criticize an institution, opinion will become more negative.  In principle, there could be equal and opposite effects:  if Republican politicians say negative things about an institution, Republicans will become more negative but Democrats will become more positive.  However, I think the negative effects will generally be stronger:  people who aren't that interested in politics (that is, most people) will just notice that there's a lot of criticism and figure that where there's smoke, there's fire.  

Of course, all of these factors are hard to measure, so it's hard to judge their relative influence, but a look at confidence in particular institutions may provide some hints.  Here is confidence in "big business."  

I'd regard partisan division as pretty much a constant for big business:  Democrats are always more critical and Republicans more favorable, and it's consistently a leading issue.  So the trend can be taken to represent the gradual shift in general outlook.  The ups and downs seem to correspond pretty well to economic conditions (or at least to perceived economic conditions).  

Next, confidence in the public schools and higher education.  For the public schools, there's steady decline, with little short-term variation.  Also, it's a stronger downward trend than for big business (-.011 vs. -.006).  Is that because the performance of schools has been declining steadily?  National Assessment of Education Progress scores improved from the 1970s to 2012--they've declined since then (Stephens links to a report of decline between 2019 and 2023), but are still above the 1970s level.  What about partisan politics?  Although I don't have a measure, I think that partisan divisions have increased.  Schools used to be financed and run primarily at the local level, and both parties were generally favorable to public education.  Over time, Republicans have become more favorable to school choice, local controversies over curricula and libraries have gotten national attention, and the role of federal funding (and regulation) has increased.  So I would attribute the larger decline for schools, compared to big business, to an increased role for partisan politics.  There are only a few years of data for higher education, but the rate of decline is even larger than for the public schools.  Universities are very slow-moving institutions, so it's safe to say that their performance didn't change much between 2015 and 2024.  But I think that partisan controversy over universities has definitely increased.

Gallup asks about a lot of institutions, so I won't consider them all individually.  But there are some exceptions to the general pattern of decline--I'll turn to them in my next post.  

*That is, the year effects from a model in which confidence in a particular institution in a particular year is the sum of a year effect and an institution effect.