My last post showed that conservative confidence in science, education, and medicine dropped over the last several years. What about other institutions? Between 2016 and 2024, conservative confidence declined for 11 out of the 13 institutions that the GSS asks about, and one of the increases (banks and financial institutions) was very small. The only substantial increase was for the Supreme Court. Among liberals, confidence increased for six institutions and declined for seven. The figure shows average liberal and conservative confidence across all institutions*:
Until 2008, conservative and liberal confidence was about the same. Since then, liberal confidence has consistently been higher, but the size of the gap increased substantially in the 2020s.
One of the institutions is "the executive branch of the federal government." That is closely related to approval of the current president, so also calculated the average for all institutions except the executive:
So liberalism is now associated with more confidence in institutions in general. Is this related to the growth of educational divisions in politics? Sometimes people say that education is associated with more positive views of institutions--they'll be more likely to think that the people in charge ("the elites") know what they're doing. There are several possible reasons, but the most obvious one is that educated people are in charge of most institutions. Of course, the average educated person doesn't have much influence, but they'll have more shared understanding and chance of personal connections with the people who do. On the other side, there is the argument that education makes people more critical. I computed correlations of confidence in different institutions with degree (no high school diploma.....graduate education).
Science .184
Supreme Court .109
Business .088
Medicine .047
Executive .031
Press .002
Banks -.017
Congress -.026
Religion -.027
Education -.042
Labor -.095
Military -.098
But these are averages over the whole time from the 1970s to 2020s. In several cases, the correlation shifts over time. The biggest changes:
The correlation was near zero in the early years, but is now negative. That is, educated people have lost confidence faster than less educated people.
It started out negative and is now near zero--educated people have gained relative to less educated people.
More and less educated people were about equally confident in the 1970s; now more educated people are more confident. This is different that the pattern for science, where more educated people have been more confident all along.
More educated people were less confident in the military in the early years, but the difference has pretty much disappeared.
With organized labor, you could say it reflects changes in composition--blue collar unions have declined and white collar unions (mostly in the public sector) have held steady or even grown. But as many people have observed, the educational divide in military service has grown. That is, educated people have become less likely to have military experience, but more likely to have confidence. I think the changes are evidence of a point I've made in a number of posts: that there's been a growth of social egalitarianism among more educated people. Of course, it's possible that more educated people have less knowledge or understanding of less educated people than they used to. But, contrary to what is often said, they have become less likely to express negative views of less educated people, or the institutions associated with less educated people.
*Except "banking and financial institutions"--that question didn't start until later.
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