ABSTRACT
Scholars, pundits, and pollsters have been talking about the state of citizengovernment relationships in the United States1 for as long as the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (2010b) has measured, since 1958, citizens’ trust in government. Each year we mark the dwindling trust in government, from an all-time high just short of 80 percent in 1958, to a low of 17 percent in October 2008 (following the financial crisis and bank bailout, matching a 1994 historic low), with numbers hovering somewhere between 20 and
25 percent in the summer of 2010 (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2010a). Poll takers’ responses to questions regarding how much of the time they trust the federal government coincide remarkably with their satisfaction with the state of the nation. The trust numbers are somewhat better for state and local governments, but trust in state and local or regional governments is also at historic lows.
