How trusted are state and local governments?

This article is the first in a two-part series about trust in state and local government. The second part can be found here. In addition, the Route Fifty staff will be exploring this issue throughout 2024. You will be able to find coverage on it here.

Let’s say you came down with a bad case of the flu. Would you tell all your friends and colleagues that you were healthy as could be—because you didn’t have pneumonia?

Probably not. But that’s exactly how the critical issue of trust in state and local governments is often couched when it’s compared to the situation in the federal government. Consider market researcher Power Almanac’s proclamation that, “Americans view local elected officials far more favorably than members of Congress. … So, keep doing what you’re doing, local government official. Americans trust you to do a very important job.”

While states and localities are unquestionably considered more trustworthy than are the feds, a look at the numbers shows they still confront a significant lack of confidence.

About 45% of Americans have a less than favorable view of the trustworthiness of local governments. That’s somewhat up from 40% in 2017, according to the engagement and analytics company Polco and its think tank, the National Research Center. The center is a major repository of disaggregated data about trust in state and local government. It is also the progenitor of The National Community Survey and a data consortia called Government Performance Action and Learning, which it helped found with University of Wisconsin, Madison’s High Road Strategy Center and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

These numbers are just averages. When you disaggregate the data, for different parts of the population, the numbers are somewhat bleaker. For example, according to Polco data, residents in New England report higher levels of confidence in local government than people in Western states. Asians and white Americans have higher overall confidence than do Black people and members of the Hispanic population; people aged 45 to 64 have lower confidence rates than any other age group.

Perhaps most notable, higher household incomes and higher education levels tend to elevate confidence in local government. Though the data don’t necessarily demonstrate this, Michelle Kobayashi, principal research analyst at Polco and the National Research Center, speculates that “the higher educated, more wealthy, more white groups may tend to trust government more. This may be due to the fact that their government leaders often tend to resemble them or that these residents have traditionally felt more welcome to share their voice in community decision-making. We also have found in our research that resident knowledge is positively associated with public trust. Knowledgeable residents tend to understand the complexities of running a government, and knowledge level is likely associated with educational background and wealth.”

As you’d anticipate, there’s a great deal of variation in the types of agencies that are most and least trusted. According to a Deloitte study, the three agencies that garnered the highest levels of trust were child care, housing assistance and food assistance. At the other end of the spectrum were law enforcement, departments of motor vehicles and unemployment insurance.

Although Deloitte did not seek out causative factors in this survey, John O’Leary, state and local government research leader at Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights, points out that “some of the assistance and beneficiary programs may just by their nature have created more positive sentiment than some of the enforcement type of agencies. … They’re different types of relationships.”  

Mistrust in states and localities impairs officials’ ability to do their jobs well. As David Cooke, city manager of Fort Worth, Texas, the fastest growing city in the U.S., put it, “Residents, businesses, taxpayers and ratepayers need to know and believe we are good stewards of their money so that they will support future bond referenda.”

Take New Orleans. In a 2021 report from the Centre for Public Impact, “members from various city departments and agencies formed an innovation team to tackle flooding in New Orleans after a ballot measure to fund infrastructure maintenance failed. By engaging deeply with residents, the city understood that the ballot measure failed because of an underlying problem: residents deeply mistrust the city.”

Cooke’s thoughts are echoed by Byron Decoteau, director of the Louisiana Department of State Civil Service. “When citizens have confidence in their government, there is a higher likelihood of their adherence to policy decisions, laws and regulations,” he says. “Ultimately, the cultivation of public trust empowers states to accomplish their objectives with greater efficiency and in a timely manner.”

The absence of trust also has a negative impact when it comes to persuading the best and brightest young people to work in state or local jobs. “It's a huge concern for me,” says Bill Shields, executive director of the American Society for Public Administration. “I’ve been teaching at American University for 24 years. I teach a course that’s very practical for undergrads, and when I first started teaching this course in 2004 or 2005, I would ask, ‘How many of you would like to work in the public sector?’ I’d have 35 students—a solid three-quarters—say yes [they would]. In the last four or five years, I’d have maybe two people raising their hands.”

When it comes to matters of trust, many experts believe that displeasure with the federal government has increasingly had a trickle-down effect on state and local partners. “Right now, a lot of people looking at federal news feel angry and powerless,” says Erin Norman, Lee Family Fellow and senior director of communications strategies at the State Policy Network. “There isn’t a good understanding of why decisions are being made. And you have a media machine that’s amplifying the negative emotions from that.”

Past public scandals at the state and local level don’t help to increase trust. In Rhode Island, as The Providence Journal reported in September, the small state has “had no shortage of politicians who have been convicted of crimes and, often, sentenced to prison. From state representatives and senators to mayors and even a former governor….”

A survey conducted by several departments at the University of Rhode Island found that, “majorities of respondents say they have little or no trust in […] Rhode Island government.” Specifically, when asked, “How much trust do you have in each of the following levels of government: a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little or none at all?” About 20% of respondents said, “None at all”; another 31% said, “A little”; only 3% said, “A great deal”; and 8% said, “A lot.”

Emily Lynch, a member of the team that created the survey, says, “Though the state has become more transparent, Rhode Island has a history of corruption that is long-standing, and the results of the survey appear to be tapping into that.”

Levels of trust in state and local governments are cyclical and can rise and fall depending on the economy and other factors. But public sector managers aren’t optimistic about the direction those levels are inclined to take in coming years. According to the Alliance for Innovation and Polco, some 57% of government managers believe that trust in local government will move downward over the coming decade, compared to 22% who think it will trend upward.

Little wonder that managers are reacting this way given that attacking government at all levels is a kind of national pastime. “There are organizations—we’re talking about the press and advocacy groups—whose business model depends essentially on government not working well,” says Mark Funkhouser, president of Funkhouser and Associates and former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri. “That is corrosive to democracy. It is corrosive to trust.”

But despite these kinds of challenges, there are steps that can be taken to heighten levels of trust. We’ll delve into some of them in the second half of this two-part series, to appear in Route Fifty shortly.