How many more years?

 On September 11, Matthew Yglesias wrote that after the terrorist attacks 25 years before "trust in the federal government soared, temporarily reversing the secular increase in cynicism that’s been happening since Watergate and the decline of the three-network news oligopoly."  I've had several posts about long-term changes in trust in the government which suggested that the decline started earlier.  Those were based on the American National Election Studies, which only happen every two years, so they don't tell much about the influence of specific events.  But one of the ANES questions "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right--just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time"--was picked up by other organizations in the 1970s and asked pretty frequently.  It hasn't been asked since 2017--it's been replaced by questions including one or two additional categories for less than some of the time--but it still covers 60 years.   

Here is the percent who choose most or almost all of the time

It peaked in 1962, then declined steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  After that, there were ups and downs, but more downs:  all/most responses didn't fall below 20% until 1993, but were pretty consistently below 20% in 2013-17.  9/11 had a big impact, but it didn't last:  in July 2003, after initial success in the Iraq war, 36% chose all or most, which put it about equal with November 1974, when the economy was in a recession and Gerald Ford had recently issued an unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon.

So the major story is of a general downward trend that started well before Watergate and the decline of network news.  I think that the underlying cause is the growth of education and the mass media, which led to a decline of deference:  people became less likely to assume that government officials knew better than they did.  Of course, these were long-term developments, but in the 1960s there was a cascade effect--the media became more critical, so people became more confident in expressing any negative views they might have, so people were surrounded by a more negative climate of opinion.  

Taking a closer look, here is the percent who choose "almost always".   Most of the surveys also recorded some volunteered "never" or "almost never" responses.   There is probably some additional variation because of differences among survey organizations, but the general pattern is clear:  the decline in confidence continued after the 1970s

I've mentioned before that the public mood seemed to become negative in the first half of the 1990s.  It's not clear why--there was a recession in 1991-2, but it wasn't that severe and the decline in confidence continued after it was over.  It's also not clear why confidence grew in the late 1990s:  the economy did well, but the main political events were the attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office and the the appearance of standoffs over debt limits, which seem like they should have had a negative impact.  But in any case, the experience of the 1990s may have some lessons for today.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]