On our most recent podcast, we discussed the “trust question,” that is, the declining public trust in both public and private institutions (but especially government). The Pew series of general trends for the federal government look like this (you may want to click to embiggen):

How do we stack up with other countries? Here’s a table from World Statistics about international measures of public trust in government, which I’ve had to post in two images because it is too long for a single screen grab:

You will notice the United States comes in with a 31% rating, which is much higher than Pew’s number, but I suspect this may be the result of a differing methodology. In the case of the U.S., surveys find that the public has much higher confidence in state and local government than in the federal government, which makes sense.

The second thing to ask is what do the “high trust” countries at the top of the list (Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc) have in common? Aside from a small territorial footprint in most cases, they tend to be more demographically homogenous. In other words, “diversity” isn’t their strength. Even some leading liberal social scientists have had to admit this.