credence qualities

A recent report from Pew has an interactive map on perceptions of trust of the government. There are also key events that attempt to contextualize the trends, as well as charts with changes in the House and incumbent losses. In 1992, Clinton inherited slipping trust from George H. W. Bush and Reagan inherited low, but rebounding numbers from Carter.

Should we expect a bloodbath in this fall’s midterms?

I think both parties need to be concerned, particularly given the trends on this chart::

Under George W. Bush, trust was in freefall for everyone in his second term. In my opinion, there was a perfect storm, which literally involved a storm. Katrina hit in 2005 and the conservative coalition started to break down, which I think became evident in the Harriet Miers nomination for the Supreme Court. The 2006 midterms with a surge of Democrat wins and Obama’s election in 2008 served to further cause Republicans to have less trust in the government.

Politicians on either side of the aisle should heed the antecedents of trust, in order to increase the odds of getting votes. In my opinion, negative rhetoric that doesn’t address increasing trustworthiness for a focal candidate is a danger.

What are the drivers of trust?

I’m working on a paper on organizational trust, based on the social psychology literature. The three antecedents of trust my co-author and I are using are::

1. Ability
2. Integrity
3. Benevolence

These are subject to contextual constraints, i.e., the current economy and the political zeitgeist which is up in the air regarding big or small government. The challenge is to craft a strategy to build trust. In a sense, Obama’s reaching across to Republicans should be appealing to benevolence, but it’s not. It may be overshadowed by integrity and ability, which given the economic woes will be hard to convince Obama’s detractors that his policies are leading us in the right direction, given the credence qualities {hard to gauge efficacy even after implementation} of economic policy. If obama and the Democrats don’t realize that this is a battle of “communication” that needs to be addressed quickly, expect losses in November.

Twitterversion:: New Pew study shows trust of the government at only 22% and for Republicans an all-time low. How can social psych. inform political strategy? @Prof_K

Song:: KMFDM-‘Trust’

Should higher education be thought of as a public infrastructure?

While in many European countries, higher education was often treated as a public good, a market ideology is increasingly being allowed to allocate access to it. The rationale is that higher education is well-suited to market mechanisms. It’s scarce, not everyone wants it, and is often available at a price. Recent trends towards market capitalism and neoliberal economics have globally hastened the transition towards a market-based view of education. Is this a good thing? Are there market failures?

First, there are political pressures in many countries to reduce public expenditures in higher education. Exploring configurations of public-private funding makes sense. In terms of market failures, or potential failures, one big issue with respect to higher education is the uncertainty of outputs. Higher education offers no express guarantees or warranties. One of its characteristics is that it has “credence qualities”, i.e., those which are hard to gauge even after purchase. Many services have credence qualities, such as consulting or legal or medical advice.

While assessment tries to address this quality issue, Mark Granovetter’s work on embeddedness shows that auditing functions are often subject to social and political forces. In a sense, assessment is really only as good as the localized culture.

Impacting the quality issue are market forces. Higher education institutions compete for students and there is a upward limit on price. The “business” of higher education tries to increase efficiencies to lower costs, by increasing “productivity” {e.g., larger class sizes} or utilizing part-time labour, graduate students, or lower-wage online instructors. The Nordic experience is one where national quality assurance agencies allow universities to develop their own quality initiatives, factoring in the multidimensional nature of quality and institutional contexts. The result is a diversity of approaches that allows flexibility, but also has sanctions for non-compliance.

I think one of the worst places for higher education to be is having an identity crisis with factions supporting radically different views. Teaching versus research can be a dichotomy, but I’ve also seen institutions struggle over going from having regional status versus national status, i.e., “we want to be great.”

Twitterversion:: Higher education & regulation.Does market ideology & the “business model” clash w/quality & accountability?#ThickCulture http://url.ie/5o75 @Prof_K

Song:: Bishop Allen-‘Charm School’