It really is the economy, stupid
By Clive Crook / Bloomberg Opinion
Across much of the industrial world, trust in government is low and declining. Why is this happening and why, exactly, does it matter?
An unusually thorough new study looks at these questions and finds answers that are somewhat unexpected and, in one way, more disturbing than you might have guessed.
The fact of diminished trust is hardly a revelation, least of all in countries such as the U.S., where anti-establishment populists have turned politics upside down and elite expertise has become not just distrusted but disdained.
Last year a survey found that fewer than 1 is 6 Americans expect Washington to do the right thing “nearly always” (1 percent) or “most of the time” (15 percent). At the turn of the century, such measures for the U.S. were more than twice as high. Across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, many other countries (including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, New Zealand and Chile) have also seen trust decline. But in others (such as Finland, Ireland, Portugal and Mexico) trust has increased. Levels of trust, as opposed to rates of change, also vary a lot. These widely differing patterns make it possible to examine causes.
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