Elsevier

Social Science Research

Volume 49, January 2015, Pages 356-371
Social Science Research

We trust in government, just not in yours: Race, partisanship, and political trust, 1958–2012

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.08.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The gap in political trust between Black Americans and White Americans switches over time.

  • The effects of performance assessments on trust are the same for both Black and White Americans.

  • System discontent for both Black and White Americans is reflected in partisanship, albeit in different ways.

  • Black Republicans have the highest levels of trust in government.

  • Aggregate models of political trust misrepresent the patterns for several race-partisan groups.

Abstract

Although it is generally accepted that political trust is reflective of satisfaction with the performance of the incumbent administration, this is only considered true for White Americans. Because their trust reflects a larger discontent with the political system, Black Americans, it is held, do not respond in the same way in the short term. This argument has yet to be tested with over-time data. Time matters. Not only does the race gap in trust change over time but the impact of partisanship and political winning is, by definition, time-dependent. The results of an analysis of the 1958–2012 American National Election Studies data show that Black Americans and White Americans are equally likely to tie short-term performance to trust in government. However, the relationship between partisanship and political trust and, therefore, system discontent, clearly differs for the two groups. Aggregate models that do not take race-partisan sub-group differences into account will therefore be misleading.

Introduction

It is widely held that democracies work better if citizens trust their government (Arneil, 2006, Dahl, 1956, Hetherington, 2005, Uslaner, 2002). Societies with greater political trust tend to have citizens who talk to each other, who work together, and who generally get along (Dahl, 1956, Mara, 2001, Newton, 2008, Putnam, 1995). As Hetherington (2005) so succinctly put it, trust matters.

Of key concern for scholars in the U.S. is the relationship between race and trust. Because there is nothing about skin color and physical appearance per se that should affect trust, the presence of such a relationship indicates that the political system is less responsive and less accessible to the members of particular groups, or at the very least, that particular groups perceive the political system as less responsive and accessible. For this reason, there has been a concerted effort to identify which causes of trust have race-varying effects in order to further understand the mechanisms through which this form of political inequality operates (Abramson, 1983, Avery, 2006, Citrin et al., 1975, Hetherington, 1998, Howell and Fagan, 1988, Mangum, 2011, Marshall and Shah, 2007, Miller, 1974, Putnam, 2001).

Among the correlates of trust identified as most important are assessments of political incumbents, of the electoral system, of public policy, and of the economy (Citrin and Luks, 2001, Hetherington, 2005, Keele, 2007). These, it is held, have differential effects on the trust of Black and White Americans because political trust reflects different considerations for each group. For Black Americans, trust is reflective of a deep malaise with the political system reflecting decades of political exclusion and violence (Abramson, 1983, Jung and Kwon, 2013, Nunnally, 2012). In contrast, for White Americans, trust represents short-term satisfaction with the current administration (Avery, 2006, Avery, 2007, Avery, 2008).

This research on whether there is racial variability in the causes and meaning of political trust has identified how the causes of trust matter within particular years, but it has yet to consider racial differences in political trust over time. There are reasons to suspect that conclusions concerning the impact of short-term satisfaction measures on trust may be time-dependent. Unlike the race gap in social trust (Wilkes, 2011, Smith, 2010), the race gap in political trust is extremely inconsistent. Not only is there a trust difference in some years and not in others, but the relative ranking of which group is more trusting shifts. As a result, inference as to the impact of short-term satisfaction or system discontent based on single-year samples may not be reflective of the general pattern.

Time matters because of partisanship. Not only do Black Americans have a high rate of affiliation with the Democratic Party, but partisans’ trust rises sharply when their party is in office (Keele, 2005). The lower trust of Black Americans, if observed, could be a result of being sampled in a year in which there is a Republican President.2 Single-year analysis cannot address this issue, even with controls for partisanship, because it stems from an exogenous variable that is constant for everyone within a given year. To consider a change in partisan control, and how this might be related to racial differences in trust, requires over-time data. The work presented in this paper is the first to fully address these issues related to time and trust via an analysis of 1958–2012 American National Election Studies.3

Section snippets

Race and political trust

The electoral experience of many Black Americans is characterized by multiple forms of discrimination including overt and covert disenfranchisement, contextual political irregularities, and political minority status (Omi and Winant, 1994, Walters, 2003 Wilson, 2012). Despite claims that with the election of Barak Obama, the U.S. is on its way to becoming a “post-racial” society, empirical evidence demonstrating an ongoing link between race and politics suggests otherwise (Bobo, 1997; Tesler,

Data and measures

To test these expectations I use ANES (American National Election Studies) data from 1958 to 2012. I constructed this dataset by merging the 1958–2008 cumulative data with the 2012 time series data.13 This comprises 24 separate years of data collected between 1958 and 2012. The cumulative data file variables begin with VCF and the 2012 variables are named.

Methods

The ANES data are repeated cross-sectional. I use a linear mixed approach in which individuals are treated as level one, and year is treated as level two (see also Wilkes, 2014).17 This approach allows the differences across individuals and across the trends in trust to be

Findings

Table 2 provides the results from the analysis of the effects of partisanship and short term political assessments on trust for the aggregated population. The first model in this table is an intercept-only model that apportions the variability in trust into its individual and trend components. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) indicates that about 9 percent of the variability in trust is at the year level, and the remainder represents within year differences across individuals. The

Conclusion

Because it is such a fundamental source of inequality in contemporary U.S. society, much attention has been given to race as a marker of other political outcomes. This has been especially true in terms of the level of interest in the relationship between race and trust in government (Abramson, 1983, Citrin et al., 1975, Hetherington, 1998, Howell and Fagan, 1988, Miller, 1974, Putnam, 2000). The generally accepted view is that, whereas for White Americans levels of trust in government reflect

Acknowledgments

I thank Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Claire Durand, Malcolm Fairbrother, Sylvia Fuller, Elizabeth Hirsh, Lily Ivanova, Steven Weldon and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and advice.

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