Social Capital, Government Performance, and the Dynamics of Trust in Government

For some time, it has been evident that individuals monitor the performance of the president, Congress, and the economy and adjust their trust of the government either up or down depending on what they observe. But given that trust has never returned to the levels witnessed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, despite improved government performance, some other phenomenon must contribute to the movement of trust over time. Social capital may be the force that has kept trust low. As such, to understand the movement in trust over time, we need to assess the relative contributions of both government performance and social capital at the macro level. Using macro-level data, the analysis, here, is designed to capture the overtime variation in both social capital and government performance and let them compete to explain the macro variation in trust. The empirical results demonstrate that both government performance and social capital matter but in starkly different ways. As a result, the analysis, here, advances our insight into the qualitative character of trust.