Trust in institutions is as important as the trust people have in one another. Our indicators for trust of institutions include measures of Americans’ confidence in government and the media. Confidence in government is measured by questions relating to how often you can trust government to do what is right, whether government is run by a few big interests or for the benefit of all, whether government wastes taxpayer money, and whether people running government are crooked. Trust in the media relates to the people running press organizations and how often they report the news fairly.

In general, Americans’ confidence in major institutions dropped from 1970 to 1993 (continuing a very deep slide that began in the 1960s), followed by a partial recovery through 2000 and then another slide. However, people’s trust in the government has rebounded more than their trust in media.

It is an ongoing debate whether the decline in confidence in government reflects a loss of commitment by citizens to government or a failure of the government itself. Alexander Hamilton might argue for the latter theory, for he once proposed, as a “general rule,” that people’s “confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.”20 Conversely, some think that governmental institutions and policymakers are under much greater scrutiny now than in the 1960s because of the Freedom of Information Act, a more active media, and congressional committees taking on investigatory functions. This scrutiny often produces more information that can reduce overall confidence in government. Whether feelings about government and institutions are accurate or not, it is harder to get things done in an environment in which significant numbers of Americans are cynical about the competence of major institutions or the interests they represent.