{"id":61271,"date":"2014-02-03T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-03T14:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=61271"},"modified":"2014-06-09T01:11:25","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T06:11:25","slug":"republicans-democrats-and-trust-in-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/02\/03\/republicans-democrats-and-trust-in-the-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans, Democrats, and Trust in the Government"},"content":{"rendered":"

A survey question is only as good as its choices. Sometimes an important choice has been left off the menu. \u00a0I\u00a0was Gallup polled once, long ago. I\u2019ve always felt that they didn\u2019t get my real opinion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019d they ask?\u201d said my brother when I mentioned it to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, they asked whether I approved of the way the President was doing his job.\u201d\u00a0 Nixon – this was in 1969.
\n\u201cWhat\u2019d you say?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI said I disapproved of his entire existential being.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was exaggerating my opinion, and I didn\u2019t actually say that to the pollster.\u00a0 But even if I had, my opinion would have been coded as \u201cdisapprove.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many years the American National Election Study has asked:<\/p>\n

How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right \u2013 just about always, most of the time or only some of the time?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The trouble with these choices at that they exclude the truly disaffected. The worst you can say about the federal government is that it can be trusted \u201conly some of the time.\u201d\u00a0 A few ornery souls say they don\u2019t trust the federal at all. But because that view is a write-in candidate, it usually gets only one or two percent of the vote.<\/p>\n

This year the study included \u201cnever\u201d in the options read to respondents.\u00a0 Putting \u201cno-way, no-how\u201d right there on the ballot makes a big difference. And as you\u2019d expect, there were party differences:<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

Over half of Republicans say that the federal government can NEVER be trusted.<\/p>\n

The graph appears in this\u00a0Monkey Cage post\u00a0<\/a>by Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph. Of course, some of those \u201cnever\u201d Republicans don\u2019t really mean \u201cnever ever.\u201d\u00a0 If a Republican becomes president, they\u2019ll become more trusting, and the \u201cnever-trust\u201d Democrat tide will rise.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the Hetherington-Rudolph graph tracking changes in the percent of people who do trust Washington during different administrations.<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

This one seems to show three things:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Trust took a dive in the 1960s and 70s and never really recovered.<\/li>\n
  2. Republican trust is much more volatile, with greater fluctuations depending on which party is in the White House.<\/li>\n
  3. Republicans really, really hate President Obama.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A survey question is only as good as its choices. Sometimes an important choice has been left off the menu. \u00a0I\u00a0was Gallup polled once, long ago. I\u2019ve always felt that they didn\u2019t get my real opinion. \u201cWhat\u2019d they ask?\u201d said my brother when I mentioned it to him. \u201cYou know, they asked whether I approved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":61276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[274,85,304,693],"class_list":["post-61271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-politics","tag-the-state","tag-public-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/02\/1-4.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61271"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62863,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61271\/revisions\/62863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}