Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It)

By Amy E. Lerman

American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It’s a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix.

With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government’s ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to “opt out” in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens’ beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226630342

Book preview

Good Enough for Government Work

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Good Enough for Government Work

The Public Reputation Crisis in America

(And What We Can Do to Fix It)

Amy E. Lerman

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63017-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63020-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63034-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226630342.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lerman, Amy E., 1978– author.

Title: Good enough for government work : the public reputation crisis in America (and what we can do to fix it) / Amy E. Lerman.

Other titles: Chicago studies in American politics.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Chicago studies in American politics

Identifiers: LCCN 2018052436 | ISBN 9780226630175 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226630205 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226630342 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government—Public opinion. | Public administration—United States—Public opinion. | Reputation—United States. | Public opinion—United States. | United States—Politics and government—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—21st century.

Classification: LCC E743 .L46 2019 | DDC 973.91—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052436

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

PART ONE  Foundations of the Reputation Crisis

1  The Public Reputation Crisis

2  A Brief History of Public Reputation

3  Good Enough for Government Work

PART TWO  How a Reputation Crisis Unfolds

4  Why Reputations in Crisis Are Hard to Change

5  Why Personal Experience Isn’t Always Enough

6  The Role of Reputation in a Polarized Policy Domain

PART THREE  The Consequences of a Crisis

7  The Public Reputation as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

8  When Citizens Opt In, Attitudes Can Change

PART FOUR  Rebuilding Reputation

9  Responding to a Public Crisis: Lessons from Industry

10  Putting Lessons into Practice

PART FIVE  Privatization and the Public Good

11  The Political Costs of Privatization

12  Good Government and Good Governing

13  Beyond the Reputation Crisis

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have had some of the smartest, most dedicated, and most inspiring research partners in the world, and portions of this book draw heavily on scholarship we conducted together. Chapters 2 and 12 are authored jointly with Charlotte Hill, PhD student in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapter 4 is based on work conducted with Daniel Acland, assistant professor of practice at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.¹ Chapter 7 is based on work conducted with Dr. Meredith Sadin, research associate and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and Samuel Trachtman, PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.² Chapter 8 is based on work conducted with Katherine McCabe when she was a PhD candidate in political science at Princeton University. Dr. McCabe is now assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University.³

This book has benefited immensely from the help of a series of phenomenally talented research assistants over the years. Thanks in particular to Katherine McCabe, Jennifer Onofrio, Greg Rosalsky, Meredith Sadin, and Ryan Tully. The fact that it took so long for their hard work to see the light of day is my fault alone. I am also extraordinarily grateful to Rachel Bernhard for her thoughtful comments on an early draft of this manuscript, to Michael Shohl for his valuable feedback and edits, and to Meg Wallace for building the book’s index. Enormous thanks also go to Tenaya Morningstar and Mazelle Etessami for stepping in at the last minute to assist with the tedious tasks of filling in and formatting citations (and for telling me that they were having fun even if they weren’t).

Thanks are due, too, to the many groups of faculty and graduate students who provided thoughtful feedback on various parts and drafts of this work. This includes the very kind folks in political science and public policy departments at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Georgetown, Cornell, and UPenn. In addition, it would be difficult to express how enormously grateful I am to Charlotte Hill, who has become a partner in my ongoing work on trust in government. Her phenomenal assistance compiling the case studies included in chapters 9 and 11 and her incredibly detail-oriented and insightful comments on the manuscript were invaluable. Her belief that political trust and reputation matter helped propel this project to completion.

Inordinate thanks are also due to Larry Jacobs and Charles Myers at the University of Chicago Press, who championed the idea of writing this book in a way that could make it more broadly accessible, and whose many insights resulted in a much-improved final manuscript. Thanks also to India Cooper, whose eagle-eyed copyedits saved me from the great embarrassment of multiple misspellings and misused modifiers, and to Joel Score and the rest of the team at Chicago who helped usher this book through the publication process.

Finally, to Alex and Noah: thank you for your endless patience, support, love, and patience—did I mention patience?—as I worked on this book. For the many hours I spent locked in my office, ignoring both of you (and the dog), I really do apologize. I know it’s not always easy having an unwashed and grumpy writer in the house. But having you both here cheering me on is what makes everything else possible. This book is for you, with all my love.

PART ONE

Foundations of the Reputation Crisis

ONE

The Public Reputation Crisis

If I ask you to imagine a typical public school in America today, what do you picture? For many, the images that most immediately come to mind depict some version of a large, worn-out building in a low-income area of a major American city. The school might be doing its very best to educate students, but it faces myriad challenges: teachers are underprepared and overworked; administrators are under-resourced and overwhelmed. Textbooks and equipment are outdated, and buildings and classrooms are falling apart.

Now, what if I ask you to picture a private school instead? Perhaps you imagine a neat set of buildings clustered around a small patch of bright green lawn. Kids in matching uniforms hurry to class, where enthusiastic teachers engage them in hands-on curriculum. Modern facilities house everything from a well-stocked library to a cutting-edge science lab, and full-time counselors are on hand to assist with college applications.

If these sorts of differences reflect your beliefs about public and private schools in America, you are not alone. When asked to consider what they know or have heard about how kids in the United States are educated, just 37 percent of Americans rated public schools as either excellent or good. The majority (61 percent) think of them as generally only fair or poor.¹ In fact, roughly three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) give public schools across the country a C grade or lower, suggesting they view them as barely above the bar in terms of quality.² These evaluations contrast starkly with perceptions of private school quality; more than twice as many Americans (fully 78 percent) rate the quality of a private school education as either excellent or good.³

In this book, I argue that the tendency of Americans to associate public with ineffective, inefficient, and low-quality services—and conversely, to connect private with effective, efficient, and higher-quality provision—is a central feature of our modern political culture. In fact, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that government generally does not do a good job managing programs and providing services.⁴ As one conservative commentator recently opined, Americans understand the idea of a technical team working ‘with private sector velocity and effectiveness.’ . . . No one would ever brag about working ‘with public sector velocity and effectiveness.’⁵ In recent surveys, just 14 percent of Americans voiced their belief that government is effectively managed, and a meager 7 percent of Americans think government is either excellent or good at spending money efficiently.⁶

This was not always the case. In fact, according to historians, the phrase good enough for government work originated during World War II to describe the exacting standards and high quality required by government. By the 1960s and ’70s, however, the idiom was increasingly being employed ironically, in order to denigrate public-sector efforts.⁷ Today, good enough for government work has become familiar to the point of cliché, implying that something is of such extraordinarily low quality, it could only be acceptable in government.

This semantic reversal reflects a substantial transformation in our national perceptions of government: over the past several decades, a majority of citizens have come to believe that government is wasteful and inefficient, and that the public sector is incapable of offering services that are equivalent to or better than what the private market can provide. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that government has the ability to effectively respond.

One striking feature of these beliefs about government is that they span the partisan divide. Despite deep ideological differences between members of the two major political parties in America today, both Democrats and Republicans hold consistently gloomy views of government. For instance, when asked whether government waste is a major problem, or whether when something is run by government, it is usually wasteful and inefficient, majorities across all partisan groups agree; in some recent years, partisan attitudes actually converge.⁸

We can see an example of this when we return to Americans’ perceptions of public and private education (see table 1.1). Republicans, on average, are about 13 percentage points less likely than Democrats to believe that the nation’s public schools provide a high-quality education. This is a slightly larger gap than the partisan differences in assessments of educational alternatives, including private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools, which are viewed more positively by Republicans by 5 percentage points, 8 percentage points, and 3 percentage points, respectively.⁹ However, differences in quality evaluations between Democrats and Republicans are dwarfed by Americans’ different perceptions of public school quality relative to the quality of each of these private alternatives. Public schools are consistently ranked as being of much lower quality than private schools (by 41 percentage points), parochial schools (by 32 percentage points), or charter school options (by 23 percentage points).

Table 1.1 Republicans are somewhat less positive than Democrats about public school quality, but all partisans consider public schools to be lower quality than private alternatives.

Source: 2012 Gallup News Service Social Series: Work and Education, http://www.gallup.com/poll/156974/private-schools-top-marks-educating-children.aspx.

It is true that many of our nation’s public schools are in serious trouble. Particularly in the most impoverished neighborhoods of large and diverse cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit, the plight of public schools has been well documented. The differences between public and private school quality are not that simple, though. There are also countless examples of high-quality public schools, both in these same large cities and spread across the country. School quality varies widely among private and charter schools, too. For instance, as a result of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, nearly all states now have charter schools, but some of these schools are among the state’s lowest performing.¹⁰

In fact, studies of public versus private school quality find decidedly mixed results. A recent study by the US Department of Education comparing educational outcomes for kids in over 6,900 public and 530 private schools found that, after adjusting for characteristics of the students—such as gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, and ESL (English as a second language) status—there were no significant differences in reading scores by fourth grade.¹¹ On mathematics, average scores for public school fourth-graders were actually higher relative to students in private schools, all else equal.¹² This might be surprising to most Americans who assume that public schools, on the whole, are consistently outperformed by the private alternatives.¹³ As I argue in this book, though, negative stereotypes about public-sector incompetence and inefficiency systematically bias how individuals perceive government, even when public programs and services are objectively similar to or even of higher quality than the available private alternatives.

My intention in this book is not to suggest that government is without flaws; far from it. There is no shortage of examples highlighting problems with government waste, inefficiency, incompetence, and downright dysfunction. From the delayed response to Hurricane Katrina to the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, from the Vietnam War to the 2008 financial crisis, from the Veterans Affairs hospital scandals to price escalation in military equipment acquisition, from interminably long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles to the shutdown of the Social Security website after regular business hours, from the Big Dig to the Bridge to Nowhere, American government has frequently earned its poor reputation.

My aim in this book is not to push back against this ample evidence. Indeed, I will argue throughout the following chapters that government must do more to ensure it is a wise and responsible custodian of public funds, and also that government would do well to get out of the way when private citizens left to their own devices can implement effective, efficient, and equitable solutions to the problems they face. Instead, my point is this: real and significant failures on the part of government have shaped citizens’ perceptions over the past half century—but in turn, citizens’ perceptions of government now have important effects of their own.

Anatomy of a Reputation Crisis

What has happened to American government in the eyes of its citizens can only be described as a profound public reputation crisis. In the corporate world, a reputation crisis is an event or a series of events that causes consumers to reconsider the value or integrity of a private company. Reputation harm can stem from any number of sources: a tragedy outside a company’s control threatens to undermine confidence in its operations (e.g., Johnson & Johnson takes a substantial hit after several deaths from cyanide-tainted Tylenol are reported); illegal or unethical dealings tarnish perceptions of corporate responsibility (e.g., Volkswagen struggles to appease customers and regulators after it is caught rigging its emissions systems); dissatisfaction with the quality of a particular product or service drags down the reputation of an entire brand (e.g., the British supermarket chain Tesco fights to reassure consumers after its beef burgers are found to contain large quantities of horsemeat). Generally speaking, though, a crisis event of some kind or another casts doubt on a company’s competence or ability, or calls into question its commitment to social responsibility.¹⁴ Whatever the catalyst, the initial reputational damage can have long-term and far-reaching consequences, resulting in lowered share prices, lost revenue, layoffs, or even bankruptcy and dissolution.

For a classic example of how a reputation crisis can unfold, consider the video game Pong. An incredibly simple, two-dimensional table tennis simulation, Pong was the first game developed by Atari, in 1972, and was one of the very first multiplayer arcade video games. Pong was introduced by Atari at a local bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern, and the fact that it could be played as a social rather than solo game made it an immediate favorite among patrons.¹⁵ As one of Atari’s founders noted: "It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, ‘I’d like to play Pong and there’s nobody to play.’ It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other. . . . In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, ‘I met my wife playing Pong.’"¹⁶

The arcade game soon became a staple in bars, pizza parlors, and bowling alleys around the country, and Atari profited enormously from its commercial success; Pong brought in four times the money earned by other coin-operated games available at the time.¹⁷ Flush with orders for the arcade version, Atari began developing a Home Pong console that could be sold directly to consumers.¹⁸ Video game fanatics and historians have called Pong one of the most historically significant video game titles of all time and the most important video game ever made, crediting Home Pong with helping to launch the home gaming console market.¹⁹

Atari followed on Home Pong’s success with the release of the Atari 2600. First sold in 1977, the system came with its now-iconic square joystick controllers and used removable cartridges rather than built-in games. This meant Pong could be followed by other iconic games, including Space Invaders, Frogger, and Centipede. The 2600 would come to both define and dominate the multibillion-dollar home video game market, and Atari became synonymous with home gaming. According to the director of the Videogame History Museum in Frisco, Texas, Atari started it all. Atari is what brought video games into the mainstream.²⁰ By 1982, about 80 percent of the video game market was controlled by Atari, and Atari accounted for fully 70 percent of its parent company’s revenue.

Fast forward to just a year later, and things looked decidedly different. By 1983, the video game market had crashed, and in just the second quarter of that year alone, Atari lost roughly $310 million.²¹ The company could barely give away some of its inventory. As a remarkable story in the New Yorker would later describe:

Demand for video games had fallen so much that the company [Atari] dumped fourteen trucks’ worth of merchandise in a New Mexico landfill and poured cement over the forsaken games to prevent local children from salvaging them. . . . The landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, about ninety miles north of El Paso, is the gaming world’s Roswell. This is partly, perhaps, because of its proximity to the real Roswell, but also because they’re both rumored to be hiding aliens: the dump was said to hold more than three million copies of the famously awful Atari adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.²²

For Atari, the release of the E.T. video game had been a crisis event. Following the box office success of the film, its director, Steven Spielberg, tapped Howard Scott Warshaw at Atari to design the video game. (Warshaw had made a strong impression on Spielberg with his successful video game adaption of Raiders of the Lost Ark the year before.)²³ But negotiations took longer than expected, leaving Atari with less than six weeks to get the game on store shelves in time for Christmas—compared to the standard lead time of six months or more.²⁴ As one journalist described it, the result was that in five, magical weeks, [Warshaw] took the blockbuster film E.T. and turned it into a horrible video game.²⁵ The game was a commercial flop and a gaming disaster; it was primitive, a confusing mess that left players frustrated and disoriented, and it would come to be hailed as the worst video game of all time.²⁶ When the New Mexico landfill was finally excavated in 2014, the number of E.T. cartridges was closer to thousands than millions. The symbolism could not be ignored, however: the game was literally junk.

A confluence of factors led to problems at Atari—oversaturation of the market, competition from Nintendo and the home computer, and poor internal management—and the video game market as a whole would soon rebound from the 1983 video game crash and continue to thrive. But E.T. would mark a turning point in consumers’ perceptions of Atari. The company would go on to release games that were widely considered high quality, including Ms. Pac-Man and Q*bert, but Atari could not regain its former prominence, and consumers began defecting to competitors like Nintendo and Sega. By 1985, there was no coming back; what was left of Atari’s once-mighty video-game division limped along from owner to owner for another two decades until it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2013.²⁷ The relevance of this once important company and titan of the arcade era had dwindled almost to nothingness by the turn of the millenium.²⁸

This brief history of Atari provides a step-by-step case study of a corporate reputation crisis. As the story illustrates, what makes crisis events particularly damaging is that once an organization loses its reputation for quality and competence, that reputation is exceptionally hard to restore. While product or service quality might matter in establishing a company’s reputation, it is perceptions of quality that matter most in a reputation crisis. Whether or not Atari was still capable of producing quality games was important. But once customers lost confidence in the brand, the critical question was whether the company could successfully rebuild consumers’ faith.

When private companies do not quickly rebound from a reputation crisis, they can soon find themselves in a downward spiral. First, a crisis event causes a loss in consumer confidence. As a result, corporate revenues decline. In response, the company makes cuts in order to reduce expenditures. In turn, this enforced austerity leads to an actual reduction in customer service or product quality, which merely serves to confirm consumers’ negative views. In this way, a reputation crisis quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as customers defect and service quality declines.

In this book, I argue that the same phenomenon can occur in the public sector—and indeed, has occurred in America over the past half century: American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. Like reputation crises in the private sector, a public reputation crisis has three defining characteristics. First, large swaths of people come to hold predominantly negative perceptions of government. These beliefs are widespread enough that they become common knowledge and exist as shared understandings among citizens. Second, negative perceptions are highly resistant to change. Even in the face of new information about the cost, quality, or effectiveness of government, beliefs about government persist. Third, those who hold particularly negative perceptions begin to opt out. That is, when given the opportunity, individuals who believe government is wasteful and inefficient will choose to move from public services to private alternatives, when feasible. And when sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision, with consequences for us all.

1. Government’s poor reputation is pervasive.

Distrust of government and poor evaluations of public-sector competence and efficiency have long been a central feature of our political culture. As I describe in chapter 2, the roots of the modern reputation crisis can be traced as far back as the 1930s, a decade that found a nation struggling with economic depression and massive unemployment. In response, the government enacted a set of sweeping federal reforms. As these New Deal policies were launched, and then later as World War II began to necessitate greater government intervention in the economy, elites generally championed the public sector as having a meaningful role to play.

Behind the scenes, however, libertarian intellectuals were chafing at this expansion of government. Their concerns gained influence in far-right Republican circles, with Barry Goldwater popularizing themes of government overreach and incompetence in his 1964 campaign. Though he lost to Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater’s messages resonated, and subsequently provided conservatives with a ready critique every time a government policy or program failed—for instance, stagflation wasn’t just a problem but a problem with government.

Democrats, too, began to cautiously embrace this language in their subsequent campaigns, successfully moving anti-government rhetoric from the ideological right to the mainstream. Reagan was not the first of the post-1945 presidents to run on an anti-government program, writes historian Daniel Rodgers.²⁹ When Jimmy Carter emerged as a presidential candidate in the 1976 election, he campaigned with the line Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision.³⁰ Granted, Carter was proposing not an abandonment of government but a revitalization of the American spirit. Largely gone, though, were the days of Democratic candidates praising government as the answer to America’s ills. By the time Reagan was elected, voters had been fully steeped in political rhetoric that enthusiastically railed against public-sector excesses and explicitly denigrated the capabilities of government.

Indeed, many elites appear more likely to chastise government for its failures rather than celebrate it for its accomplishments. This routine disparagement of government has become a regular and even expected feature of our political discourse. For instance, one of the central themes of the 2016 presidential election was the need to reform and improve government operations. Running as the ultimate outsider candidate, Donald Trump promised to aggressively cut the size of government, eliminating several major agencies in order to reduce public spending. While his proposed tax cut would increase the size of the debt by an estimated $10 trillion, he insisted much of that cost could be mitigated by cracking down on public mismanagement and inefficiency. Department of Education. We’re getting rid of Common Core, he said during the campaign. Department of Environmental Protection. We’re going take a tremendous amount out. The waste, fraud, and abuse is massive.³¹

Coming from a Republican candidate seeking to appeal to a particularly disaffected segment of the American electorate, this sort of anti-government message might be expected. What is more remarkable is how closely it echoes sentiments from the major candidates on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton touched on issues of both waste and competence when she noted in a campaign speech: There are a lot of training programs and education programs that I think can be streamlined. I would like to take a hard look at every part of the federal government and do the kind of analysis that would rebuild some confidence that we’re taking a hard look about what we have and what we don’t need anymore.³² Similarly, Bernie Sanders, who also made government dysfunction a centerpiece of his candidacy, said during the primary campaign, I believe in government, but I believe in efficient government, not wasteful government. Sanders opined that we have also got to take a look at the waste and inefficiencies in the Department of Defense, which is the one major agency of government that has not been able to be audited. I have the feeling you’re going to find a lot of cost overruns there and a lot of waste and duplicative activities.³³

Though his immediate concern is with defense spending, Sanders seems to suggest that the only reason other areas of government are not similarly rife with waste is that they are being more closely monitored, not that they are any more competent. In this way, criticism of particular domains might easily be generalized, causing the public to question whether anything government does is really done well. By highlighting the need to improve how government operates, political elites on both sides of the aisle emphasize to citizens that they believe government is broken. When we campaign ‘to root out waste, abuse and inefficiency,’ writes Patrick Bresette, and point to some of the savings we have identified, the public often asks, ‘If they found that much, imagine how much more there must be.’³⁴

In the coming chapters, I present a wide range of policy examples to illustrate how government’s reputation can affect citizens’ attitudes and behavior in important ways. I have chosen these examples carefully, in order to cut across four important dimensions of the political world. Some of the cases I discuss involve national policies, like Medicare, while others are primarily governed at the local level, like sanitation and waste management. Some, like the Affordable Care Act, are highly contentious and polarized, while others, like highway and street repair, are largely apolitical. Some of the cases I discuss are issues on which Democrats have generally championed government intervention (e.g., public health and public education), while others have historically been domains in which Republicans have backed robust public spending (e.g., prisons and the military). Some have been subject to a great deal of outsourcing and privatization (e.g., garbage collection), while others remain primarily—though not exclusively—provided by government (e.g., policing).

In each of these policy domains, I find that the basic tendency toward negative stereotyping appears among large swaths of the citizenry. As I will show, there is broad consensus that waste and inefficiency characterize a wide array of government activities and institutions. Likewise, while Americans appear more confident in the capacity of their local and state governments relative to the government in Washington, many Americans question the competence of government at every level.³⁵ Certainly, not all Americans disapprove of government; attitudes toward the public sector differ somewhat across demographic groups. However, as I describe in chapter 3, distrust in government is now at historically high levels, and this distrust cuts across categories of income and education, as well as across generational divides, gender, race, and ethnicity.³⁶ It also cuts across the partisan divide.

This is somewhat surprising; in the modern age of American hyperpolarization, we often assume that support for downsizing government is primarily