222 Chapter 6Chapter 6 || Public OpinionPublic Opinionimportant principles, from foreign policy to domestic issues, civil liberties, and morality.
Principles such as these are a kind of consideration—they form the basis for opinions that
people express in surveys or act on when they vote or engage in other political behavior.
The figure shows, first, that only about one-fifth of the electorate (Solid Liberals and
Country-First Conservatives) hold consistent ideological beliefs—meaning that they
generally give one kind of answer (conservative or liberal) when asked questions that
tap their underlying principles. Moreover, most people fall into one of the intermediate
groups, meaning that they express a mix of liberal and conservative issue positions.
While these data confirm that Americans disagree on important policy questions,
they argue against the conception of a polarized America, with a large group of secular
liberals opposing another large group of religious conservatives, and few people in
the middle. Public opinion is much more complex. Most people could be labeled as
liberals or as conservatives, secular or religious, depending on which issues they are
asked about. Thus, even though people say they are liberals (or conservatives), this
response does not mean that they hold liberal (or conservative) preferences on all
issues. In addition, self-professed moderates may hold relatively extreme preferences
on certain policy questions. Thus, understanding what Americans think and what they
want from government often requires data on specific policy questions rather than
broad judgments about the liberal or conservative nature of American public opinion.
(Whether elected officials themselves are more polarized than their constituents is a
different story, which we will discuss in Chapter 11.)Evaluations of Government and Officeholders
Another set of politically significant opinions addresses how people view their
government: How well or poorly do they think the government is doing? Do they trust
the government? How do they evaluate individual politicians? These opinions matter
for several reasons. Citizens’ judgments about the government’s overall performance
may shape their evaluations of specific policies, especially if they do not know much
about the policies.^43 Evaluations of specific policies may also be shaped by how much a
citizen trusts the government; greater trust brings more positive evaluations.^44 Trust in
government and overall evaluations might also influence a citizen’s willingness to vote
for incumbent congressional representatives or for a president seeking reelection.^45
The top graph in Figure 6.4 reveals that the average American is fairly disenchanted
with the government. As of 2018, a majority believes that government is not run for
the benefit of all the people and that government programs are usually wasteful and
inefficient. These beliefs have not changed much over the last generation.
This impression of a disenchanted and disapproving public is reinforced by the
second graph, which generally shows declining levels of trust in government since
the 1960s. Within this overall trend, trust generally increases given a strong economy
(the mid-1980s and late 1990s) and declines during economic hard times (the mid-
2000s to now). As noted earlier, many scholars have argued that low levels of trust
make it harder for elected officials to enact new policies, especially those that require
large expenditures.^46 On a more profound level, some scholars argue that low levels of
trust raise questions about the future of democracy in America.^47 How can we say that
American democracy is a good or popular form of government when so many people
are unhappy with the performance of elected officials and bureaucrats and so few
people trust the government?
Interestingly, one response to this question is that low trust in government does
not preclude people from approving of specific government programs and activities.Trust in government reached a low
point during the mid-1970s. The
decline partly reflected the economic
downturn and conflict over the
Vietnam War, but opinions were
also shaped by the discovery that
President Richard Nixon had lied
about the Watergate scandal. Here,
Nixon resigns from office to avoid
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