What the Research Says About Declining Trust in Institutions

What this note covers

This note summarizes, in plain language, long-running survey research on Americans' trust and confidence in major institutions — government, media, organized religion, and others — and what social scientists believe is driving the long-term trend. It is written for readers who want the findings without the jargon, and it draws on decades of tracking data rather than any single survey.

The long-term trend

Multiple independent survey programs, including the General Social Survey run out of the University of Chicago and long-running measures from Pew Research Center and Gallup, have tracked public confidence in major American institutions since the 1970s. Nearly every one of these programs finds the same broad pattern: confidence in Congress, the presidency, the media, organized religion, banks, and large corporations has declined substantially from the levels recorded when tracking began, with some fluctuation around specific events but a persistent downward trend across decades. Trust in the military and, more narrowly, in small business and local institutions has generally held up better than trust in large national institutions, though even these have softened somewhat in more recent years.

Trust in government specifically has followed a particularly steep and well-documented decline. Surveys asking Americans how often they trust the federal government to do what is right found large majorities answering "most of the time" or "just about always" in the 1960s; that share has fallen to a small minority in recent decades, with only brief, partial recoveries around moments of national crisis.

What researchers believe is driving it

No single explanation commands universal agreement, but several factors recur across the academic literature and are treated as significant contributors rather than as the sole cause.

A series of major institutional failures and scandals across the 1960s and 1970s — a lost war, a presidential resignation, revelations of government deception — are widely credited with an initial, sharp drop in trust that never fully recovered. Subsequent decades added their own institution-specific shocks: financial-sector failures denting trust in banks, media consolidation and high-profile errors denting trust in the press, clergy scandals denting trust in religious institutions.

Rising political polarization is also frequently cited. As trust in institutions increasingly diverges by partisan affiliation — with confidence in a given institution often rising or falling sharply depending on which party controls it — researchers describe this as evidence that some institutional trust has become entangled with partisan identity rather than reflecting a stable, independent assessment of institutional performance.

Changes in the media environment are commonly cited as well, though researchers are more divided on how much weight to give this factor relative to the others: a more fragmented, higher-volume information environment makes institutional failures more visible and more shareable than they once were, which some researchers argue inflates the perception of institutional failure even where actual performance has been flat.

What does not fit the simple story

Two findings complicate any narrative of simple, uniform decline. First, trust in institutions closer to daily life — local government, local schools, small businesses, and in most surveys the police in one's own community as distinct from policing as a national issue — has generally eroded less than trust in remote, national-scale institutions. This suggests the decline is not a uniform loss of faith in authority as such, but is concentrated in institutions people experience mainly through media coverage rather than direct contact.

Second, trust levels move, sometimes sharply, in response to specific events and can partially recover, which argues against any theory in which the decline is simply an irreversible generational or cultural shift. Confidence in specific institutions has ticked upward following moments of visible, competent performance, even amid a longer downward trend.

Trust has eroded most where people have the least direct contact, and it has moved — sometimes upward — in response to real, visible performance.

What this does and does not mean

It would be a mistake to read this research as showing that institutions have uniformly gotten worse; the research measures confidence, not institutional quality, and the two can diverge in either direction. It would also be a mistake to treat the decline as fully explained; researchers continue to debate the relative weight of the factors above, and country-specific data suggests the pattern is not uniquely American, which complicates explanations that rely heavily on U.S.-specific political events.

What the evidence robustly supports is that the decline is real, long-running, broad across most national institutions, and only partially explained by any single cause identified so far.

Open questions

Researchers continue to study whether declining institutional trust is a cause or a consequence of rising polarization, whether it can be durably reversed by anything short of a long period of visible institutional performance, and how much of the recent softening in trust toward local institutions reflects the same national dynamics reaching a new scale.