Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It) 9780226630342

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Good Enough for Government Work

CHICAGO ST U DIE S I N A MER ICA N POLI T IC S A series edited by Benjamin I. Page, Susan Herbst, Lawrence R. Jacobs, and Adam J. Berinsky ALSO IN THE SERIES:

Who Wants to Run? How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization by Andrew B. Hall From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity by Michele F. Margolis The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized by Daniel J. Hopkins Legacies of Losing in American Politics by Jeffrey K. Tulis and Nicole Mellow Legislative Style by William Bernhard and Tracy Sulkin Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South, 1832–2012 by John H. Aldrich and John D. Griffi n Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public by Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology by Gregory Koger and Matthew J. Lebo The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker by Katherine J. Cramer Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era by Michael Tesler Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives by James M. Curry Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis by Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph

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Good Enough for Government Work The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It)

AMY E. LERMAN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 63017-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 63020-5 (paper) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 63034-2 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226630342 .001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lerman, Amy E., 1978– author. Title: Good enough for government work : the public reputation crisis in America (and what we can do to fi x it) / Amy E. Lerman. Other titles: Chicago studies in American politics. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Chicago studies in American politics Identifiers: LCCN 2018052436 | ISBN 9780226630175 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226630205 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226630342 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government—Public opinion. | Public administration—United States—Public opinion. | Reputation—United States. | Public opinion—United States. | United States—Politics and government—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC E743 .L46 2019 | DDC 973.91—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052436 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Acknowledgments

PA R T O N E

1 2 3

4 5 6

8

9 10

73 89 116

The Consequences of a Crisis

The Public Reputation as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy When Citizens Opt In, Attitudes Can Change

PA R T FO U R

3 26 48

How a Reputation Crisis Unfolds

Why Reputations in Crisis Are Hard to Change Why Personal Experience Isn’t Always Enough The Role of Reputation in a Polarized Policy Domain

PA R T T H R EE

7

Foundations of the Reputation Crisis

The Public Reputation Crisis A Brief History of Public Reputation “Good Enough for Government Work”

PA R T T WO

vii

131 149

Rebuilding Reputation

Responding to a Public Crisis: Lessons from Industry Putting Lessons into Practice

169 181

PA R T FI V E

11 12 13

Privatization and the Public Good

The Political Costs of Privatization Good Government and Good Governing Beyond the Reputation Crisis

Notes 247 Index 307

197 213 225

Acknowledgments I am fortunate to have had some of the smartest, most dedicated, and most inspiring research partners in the world, and portions of this book draw heavily on scholarship we conducted together. Chapters 2 and 12 are authored jointly with Charlotte Hill, PhD student in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapter 4 is based on work conducted with Daniel Acland, assistant professor of practice at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.1 Chapter 7 is based on work conducted with Dr. Meredith Sadin, research associate and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and Samuel Trachtman, PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.2 Chapter 8 is based on work conducted with Katherine McCabe when she was a PhD candidate in political science at Princeton University. Dr. McCabe is now assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University.3 This book has benefited immensely from the help of a series of phenomenally talented research assistants over the years. Thanks in particular to Katherine McCabe, Jennifer Onofrio, Greg Rosalsky, Meredith Sadin, and Ryan Tully. The fact that it took so long for their hard work to see the light of day is my fault alone. I am also extraordinarily grateful to Rachel Bernhard for her thoughtful comments on an early draft of this manuscript, to Michael Shohl for his valuable feedback and edits, and to Meg Wallace for building the book’s index. Enormous thanks also go to Tenaya Morningstar and Mazelle Etessami for stepping in at the last minute to assist with the tedious tasks vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

of filling in and formatting citations (and for telling me that they were having “fun” even if they weren’t). Thanks are due, too, to the many groups of faculty and graduate students who provided thoughtful feedback on various parts and drafts of this work. This includes the very kind folks in political science and public policy departments at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Georgetown, Cornell, and UPenn. In addition, it would be difficult to express how enormously grateful I am to Charlotte Hill, who has become a partner in my ongoing work on trust in government. Her phenomenal assistance compiling the case studies included in chapters 9 and 11 and her incredibly detail- oriented and insightful comments on the manuscript were invaluable. Her belief that political trust and reputation matter helped propel this project to completion. Inordinate thanks are also due to Larry Jacobs and Charles Myers at the University of Chicago Press, who championed the idea of writing this book in a way that could make it more broadly accessible, and whose many insights resulted in a much-improved final manuscript. Thanks also to India Cooper, whose eagle- eyed copyedits saved me from the great embarrassment of multiple misspellings and misused modifiers, and to Joel Score and the rest of the team at Chicago who helped usher this book through the publication process. Finally, to Alex and Noah: thank you for your endless patience, support, love, and patience— did I mention patience?— as I worked on this book. For the many hours I spent locked in my office, ignoring both of you (and the dog), I really do apologize. I know it’s not always easy having an unwashed and grumpy writer in the house. But having you both here cheering me on is what makes everything else possible. This book is for you, with all my love.

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Foundations of the Reputation Crisis

ONE

The Public Reputation Crisis If I ask you to imagine a typical public school in America today, what do you picture? For many, the images that most immediately come to mind depict some version of a large, worn- out building in a low-income area of a major American city. The school might be doing its very best to educate students, but it faces myriad challenges: teachers are underprepared and overworked; administrators are under-resourced and overwhelmed. Textbooks and equipment are outdated, and buildings and classrooms are falling apart. Now, what if I ask you to picture a private school instead? Perhaps you imagine a neat set of buildings clustered around a small patch of bright green lawn. Kids in matching uniforms hurry to class, where enthusiastic teachers engage them in hands- on curriculum. Modern facilities house everything from a well-stocked library to a cutting- edge science lab, and full-time counselors are on hand to assist with college applications. If these sorts of differences reflect your beliefs about public and private schools in America, you are not alone. When asked to consider what they know or have heard about how kids in the United States are educated, just 37 percent of Americans rated public schools as either excellent or good. The majority (61 percent) think of them as generally only fair or poor.1 In fact, roughly three- quarters of Americans (76 percent) give public schools across the country a C grade or lower, suggesting they view them as barely above the bar in terms of quality.2 These evaluations contrast starkly with perceptions of private school 3

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quality; more than twice as many Americans (fully 78 percent) rate the quality of a private school education as either excellent or good.3 In this book, I argue that the tendency of Americans to associate “public” with ineffective, inefficient, and low- quality services—and conversely, to connect “private” with effective, efficient, and higherquality provision—is a central feature of our modern political culture. In fact, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that government generally does not do a good job managing programs and providing services.4 As one conservative commentator recently opined, Americans understand the idea of a “technical team working ‘with private sector velocity and effectiveness.’  .  .  . No one would ever brag about working ‘with public sector velocity and effectiveness.’”5 In recent surveys, just 14 percent of Americans voiced their belief that government is effectively managed, and a meager 7 percent of Americans think government is either excellent or good at “spending money efficiently.”6 This was not always the case. In fact, according to historians, the phrase “good enough for government work” originated during World War II to describe the exacting standards and high quality required by government. By the 1960s and ’70s, however, the idiom was increasingly being employed ironically, in order to denigrate public-sector efforts.7 Today, “good enough for government work” has become familiar to the point of cliché, implying that something is of such extraordinarily low quality, it could only be acceptable in government. This semantic reversal reflects a substantial transformation in our national perceptions of government: over the past several decades, a majority of citizens have come to believe that government is wasteful and inefficient, and that the public sector is incapable of offering services that are equivalent to or better than what the private market can provide. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that government has the ability to effectively respond. One striking feature of these beliefs about government is that they span the partisan divide. Despite deep ideological differences between members of the two major political parties in America today, both Democrats and Republicans hold consistently gloomy views of government. For instance, when asked whether government waste is a “major problem,” or whether “when something is run by government, it is usually wasteful and inefficient,” majorities across all partisan groups agree; in some recent years, partisan attitudes actually converge.8 We can see an example of this when we return to Americans’ perceptions of public and private education (see table 1.1). Republicans, on average, are about 13 percentage points less likely than Democrats to 4

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Table 1.1 Republicans are somewhat less positive than Democrats about public school quality, but all partisans consider public schools to be lower quality than private alternatives.

Private Parochial Charter Public

Rep (%)

Ind (%)

Dem (%)

Total (%)

82 77 60 33

77 65 62 34

77 69 57 46

78 69 60 37

Difference Difference (Rep–Dem) (option–public) 5 8 3 –13

41 32 23 —

Source: 2012 Gallup News Service Social Series: Work and Education, http://www.gallup.com/poll/ 156974/private -schools-top - marks- educating - children.aspx.

believe that the nation’s public schools provide a high- quality education. This is a slightly larger gap than the partisan differences in assessments of educational alternatives, including private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools, which are viewed more positively by Republicans by 5 percentage points, 8 percentage points, and 3 percentage points, respectively.9 However, differences in quality evaluations between Democrats and Republicans are dwarfed by Americans’ different perceptions of public school quality relative to the quality of each of these private alternatives. Public schools are consistently ranked as being of much lower quality than private schools (by 41 percentage points), parochial schools (by 32 percentage points), or charter school options (by 23 percentage points). It is true that many of our nation’s public schools are in serious trouble. Particularly in the most impoverished neighborhoods of large and diverse cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit, the plight of public schools has been well documented. The differences between public and private school quality are not that simple, though. There are also countless examples of high- quality public schools, both in these same large cities and spread across the country. School quality varies widely among private and charter schools, too. For instance, as a result of the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top,” nearly all states now have charter schools, but some of these schools are among the state’s lowest performing.10 In fact, studies of public versus private school quality find decidedly mixed results. A recent study by the US Department of Education comparing educational outcomes for kids in over 6,900 public and 530 private schools found that, after adjusting for characteristics of the students— such as gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, and ESL (English as a second language) status—there were no significant differences in reading scores by fourth grade.11 On mathematics, aver5

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age scores for public school fourth-graders were actually higher relative to students in private schools, all else equal.12 This might be surprising to most Americans who assume that public schools, on the whole, are consistently outperformed by the private alternatives.13 As I argue in this book, though, negative stereotypes about public-sector incompetence and inefficiency systematically bias how individuals perceive government, even when public programs and services are objectively similar to or even of higher quality than the available private alternatives. My intention in this book is not to suggest that government is without flaws; far from it. There is no shortage of examples highlighting problems with government waste, inefficiency, incompetence, and downright dysfunction. From the delayed response to Hurricane Katrina to the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, from the Vietnam War to the 2008 financial crisis, from the Veterans Affairs hospital scandals to price escalation in military equipment acquisition, from interminably long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles to the shutdown of the Social Security website after regular business hours, from the Big Dig to the Bridge to Nowhere, American government has frequently earned its poor reputation. My aim in this book is not to push back against this ample evidence. Indeed, I will argue throughout the following chapters that government must do more to ensure it is a wise and responsible custodian of public funds, and also that government would do well to get out of the way when private citizens left to their own devices can implement effective, efficient, and equitable solutions to the problems they face. Instead, my point is this: real and significant failures on the part of government have shaped citizens’ perceptions over the past half century— but in turn, citizens’ perceptions of government now have important effects of their own.

Anatomy of a Reputation Crisis What has happened to American government in the eyes of its citizens can only be described as a profound public reputation crisis. In the corporate world, a reputation crisis is an event or a series of events that causes consumers to reconsider the value or integrity of a private company. Reputation harm can stem from any number of sources: a tragedy outside a company’s control threatens to undermine confidence in its operations (e.g., Johnson & Johnson takes a substantial hit after several deaths from cyanide-tainted Tylenol are reported); illegal 6

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or unethical dealings tarnish perceptions of corporate responsibility (e.g., Volkswagen struggles to appease customers and regulators after it is caught rigging its emissions systems); dissatisfaction with the quality of a particular product or service drags down the reputation of an entire brand (e.g., the British supermarket chain Tesco fights to reassure consumers after its beef burgers are found to contain large quantities of horsemeat). Generally speaking, though, a crisis event of some kind or another casts doubt on a company’s competence or ability, or calls into question its commitment to social responsibility.14 Whatever the catalyst, the initial reputational damage can have long-term and farreaching consequences, resulting in lowered share prices, lost revenue, layoffs, or even bankruptcy and dissolution. For a classic example of how a reputation crisis can unfold, consider the video game Pong. An incredibly simple, two- dimensional table tennis simulation, Pong was the first game developed by Atari, in 1972, and was one of the very first multiplayer arcade video games. Pong was introduced by Atari at a local bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern, and the fact that it could be played as a social rather than solo game made it an immediate favorite among patrons.15 As one of Atari’s founders noted: “It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, ‘I’d like to play Pong and there’s nobody to play.’ It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other.  .  .  . In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, ‘I met my wife playing Pong.’”16 The arcade game soon became a staple in bars, pizza parlors, and bowling alleys around the country, and Atari profited enormously from its commercial success; Pong brought in four times the money earned by other coin- operated games available at the time.17 Flush with orders for the arcade version, Atari began developing a Home Pong console that could be sold directly to consumers.18 Video game fanatics and historians have called Pong “one of the most historically significant” video game titles of all time and “the most important video game ever made,” crediting Home Pong with helping to launch the home gaming console market.19 Atari followed on Home Pong’s success with the release of the Atari 2600. First sold in 1977, the system came with its now-iconic square joystick controllers and used removable cartridges rather than builtin games. This meant Pong could be followed by other iconic games, including Space Invaders, Frogger, and Centipede. The 2600 would come to both define and dominate the multibillion- dollar home video 7

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game market, and Atari became synonymous with home gaming. According to the director of the Videogame History Museum in Frisco, Texas, “Atari started it all. Atari is what brought video games into the mainstream.”20 By 1982, about 80 percent of the video game market was controlled by Atari, and Atari accounted for fully 70 percent of its parent company’s revenue. Fast forward to just a year later, and things looked decidedly different. By 1983, the video game market had crashed, and in just the second quarter of that year alone, Atari lost roughly $310 million.21 The company could barely give away some of its inventory. As a remarkable story in the New Yorker would later describe: Demand for video games had fallen so much that the company [Atari] dumped fourteen trucks’ worth of merchandise in a New Mexico landfill and poured cement over the forsaken games to prevent local children from salvaging them. . . . The landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, about ninety miles north of El Paso, is the gaming world’s Roswell. This is partly, perhaps, because of its proximity to the real Roswell, but also because they’re both rumored to be hiding aliens: the dump was said to hold more than three million copies of the famously awful Atari adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.”22

For Atari, the release of the E.T. video game had been a crisis event. Following the box office success of the film, its director, Steven Spielberg, tapped Howard Scott Warshaw at Atari to design the video game. (Warshaw had made a strong impression on Spielberg with his successful video game adaption of Raiders of the Lost Ark the year before.)23 But negotiations took longer than expected, leaving Atari with less than six weeks to get the game on store shelves in time for Christmas— compared to the standard lead time of six months or more.24 As one journalist described it, the result was that “in five, magical weeks, [Warshaw] took the blockbuster film E.T. and turned it into a horrible video game.”25 The game was “a commercial flop and a gaming disaster”; it was “primitive,” “a confusing mess that left players frustrated and disoriented,” and it would come to be hailed as “the worst video game of all time.”26 When the New Mexico landfi ll was finally excavated in 2014, the number of E.T. cartridges was closer to thousands than millions. The symbolism could not be ignored, however: the game was literally junk. A confluence of factors led to problems at Atari— oversaturation of the market, competition from Nintendo and the home computer, and poor internal management— and the video game market as a whole 8

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would soon rebound from the 1983 video game crash and continue to thrive. But E.T. would mark a turning point in consumers’ perceptions of Atari. The company would go on to release games that were widely considered high quality, including Ms. Pac-Man and Q*bert, but Atari could not regain its former prominence, and consumers began defecting to competitors like Nintendo and Sega. By 1985, there was no coming back; “what was left of Atari’s once-mighty video-game division limped along from owner to owner for another two decades” until it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2013. 27 The relevance of this “once important” company and “titan of the arcade era” had “dwindled almost to nothingness by the turn of the millenium.”28 This brief history of Atari provides a step-by-step case study of a corporate reputation crisis. As the story illustrates, what makes crisis events particularly damaging is that once an organization loses its reputation for quality and competence, that reputation is exceptionally hard to restore. While product or service quality might matter in establishing a company’s reputation, it is perceptions of quality that matter most in a reputation crisis. Whether or not Atari was still capable of producing quality games was important. But once customers lost confidence in the brand, the critical question was whether the company could successfully rebuild consumers’ faith. When private companies do not quickly rebound from a reputation crisis, they can soon find themselves in a downward spiral. First, a crisis event causes a loss in consumer confidence. As a result, corporate revenues decline. In response, the company makes cuts in order to reduce expenditures. In turn, this enforced austerity leads to an actual reduction in customer service or product quality, which merely serves to confirm consumers’ negative views. In this way, a reputation crisis quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as customers defect and service quality declines. In this book, I argue that the same phenomenon can occur in the public sector—and indeed, has occurred in America over the past half century: American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. Like reputation crises in the private sector, a public reputation crisis has three defining characteristics. First, large swaths of people come to hold predominantly negative perceptions of government. These beliefs are widespread enough that they become “common knowledge” and exist as shared understandings among citizens. Second, negative perceptions are highly resistant to change. Even in the face of new information about the cost, quality, or effectiveness of government, beliefs about government persist. Third, those who hold particularly negative 9

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perceptions begin to “opt out.” That is, when given the opportunity, individuals who believe government is wasteful and inefficient will choose to move from public services to private alternatives, when feasible. And when sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision, with consequences for us all. 1. Government’s poor reputation is pervasive. Distrust of government and poor evaluations of public-sector competence and efficiency have long been a central feature of our political culture. As I describe in chapter 2, the roots of the modern reputation crisis can be traced as far back as the 1930s, a decade that found a nation struggling with economic depression and massive unemployment. In response, the government enacted a set of sweeping federal reforms. As these New Deal policies were launched, and then later as World War II began to necessitate greater government intervention in the economy, elites generally championed the public sector as having a meaningful role to play. Behind the scenes, however, libertarian intellectuals were chafing at this expansion of government. Their concerns gained influence in far-right Republican circles, with Barry Goldwater popularizing themes of government overreach and incompetence in his 1964 campaign. Though he lost to Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater’s messages resonated, and subsequently provided conservatives with a ready critique every time a government policy or program failed—for instance, stagflation wasn’t just a problem but a problem with government. Democrats, too, began to cautiously embrace this language in their subsequent campaigns, successfully moving anti-government rhetoric from the ideological right to the mainstream. “Reagan was not the first of the post-1945 presidents to run on an anti-government program,” writes historian Daniel Rodgers.29 When Jimmy Carter emerged as a presidential candidate in the 1976 election, he campaigned with the line “Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision.”30 Granted, Carter was proposing not an abandonment of government but a revitalization of the American spirit. Largely gone, though, were the days of Democratic candidates praising government as the answer to America’s ills. By the time Reagan was elected, voters had been fully steeped in political rhetoric that enthusiastically railed against public-sector excesses and explicitly denigrated the capabilities of government. 10

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Indeed, many elites appear more likely to chastise government for its failures rather than celebrate it for its accomplishments. This routine disparagement of government has become a regular and even expected feature of our political discourse. For instance, one of the central themes of the 2016 presidential election was the need to reform and improve government operations. Running as the ultimate outsider candidate, Donald Trump promised to aggressively cut the size of government, eliminating several major agencies in order to reduce public spending. While his proposed tax cut would increase the size of the debt by an estimated $10 trillion, he insisted much of that cost could be mitigated by cracking down on public mismanagement and inefficiency. “Department of Education. We’re getting rid of Common Core,” he said during the campaign. “Department of Environmental Protection. We’re going take a tremendous amount out. The waste, fraud, and abuse is massive.”31 Coming from a Republican candidate seeking to appeal to a particularly disaffected segment of the American electorate, this sort of anti-government message might be expected. What is more remarkable is how closely it echoes sentiments from the major candidates on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton touched on issues of both waste and competence when she noted in a campaign speech: “There are a lot of training programs and education programs that I think can be streamlined. I would like to take a hard look at every part of the federal government and do the kind of analysis that would rebuild some confidence that we’re taking a hard look about what we have and what we don’t need anymore.”32 Similarly, Bernie Sanders, who also made government dysfunction a centerpiece of his candidacy, said during the primary campaign, “I believe in government, but I believe in efficient government, not wasteful government.” Sanders opined that “we have also got to take a look at the waste and inefficiencies in the Department of Defense, which is the one major agency of government that has not been able to be audited. I have the feeling you’re going to find a lot of cost overruns there and a lot of waste and duplicative activities.”33 Though his immediate concern is with defense spending, Sanders seems to suggest that the only reason other areas of government are not similarly rife with waste is that they are being more closely monitored, not that they are any more competent. In this way, criticism of particular domains might easily be generalized, causing the public to question whether anything government does is really done well. By highlighting the need to improve how government operates, political elites on both sides of the aisle emphasize to citizens that they believe 11

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government is broken. “When we campaign ‘to root out waste, abuse and inefficiency,’” writes Patrick Bresette, “and point to some of the savings we have identified, the public often asks, ‘If they found that much, imagine how much more there must be.’”34 In the coming chapters, I present a wide range of policy examples to illustrate how government’s reputation can affect citizens’ attitudes and behavior in important ways. I have chosen these examples carefully, in order to cut across four important dimensions of the political world. Some of the cases I discuss involve national policies, like Medicare, while others are primarily governed at the local level, like sanitation and waste management. Some, like the Affordable Care Act, are highly contentious and polarized, while others, like highway and street repair, are largely apolitical. Some of the cases I discuss are issues on which Democrats have generally championed government intervention (e.g., public health and public education), while others have historically been domains in which Republicans have backed robust public spending (e.g., prisons and the military). Some have been subject to a great deal of outsourcing and privatization (e.g., garbage collection), while others remain primarily—though not exclusively—provided by government (e.g., policing). In each of these policy domains, I find that the basic tendency toward negative stereotyping appears among large swaths of the citizenry. As I will show, there is broad consensus that waste and inefficiency characterize a wide array of government activities and institutions. Likewise, while Americans appear more confident in the capacity of their local and state governments relative to the government in Washington, many Americans question the competence of government at every level.35 Certainly, not all Americans disapprove of government; attitudes toward the public sector differ somewhat across demographic groups. However, as I describe in chapter 3, distrust in government is now at historically high levels, and this distrust cuts across categories of income and education, as well as across generational divides, gender, race, and ethnicity.36 It also cuts across the partisan divide. This is somewhat surprising; in the modern age of American hyperpolarization, we often assume that support for downsizing government is primarily driven by a conservative ideology. Yet across a wide range of policy domains, I find that beliefs about government waste and incompetence, even once we control both for partisanship and placement on a liberal- conservative ideological scale, are significant predictors of support for privatization. In fact, in some cases, individuals’ support

12

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for privatization is three to four times more strongly associated with negative government stereotypes than with party identification. In this sense, standard ways of thinking about the debate over “big versus small government” miss substantial nuance. Disagreement over the optimal size of government has always been a central cleavage in American political life. However, public opinion on this question is not unidimensional. Rather, it encompasses disagreement about what government should focus on (its priorities), on the one hand, and what it is actually capable of achieving (its competence), on the other. Notably, when asked directly whether the bigger problem with American government is that it has the wrong priorities or is inefficient, 61 percent of Americans choose inefficiency as the more pressing concern— including fully 39 percent of Republicans.37 In fact, when forced to choose what they believe should be the highest priority for government, either reducing its scale or improving its operations, a decisive majority (62 percent) of Americans select the latter. It may not be surprising that Democrats and liberals are more likely to choose reform over retrenchment. However, nontrivial proportions of both Republicans (41 percent) and conservatives (45 percent) appear to prioritize a better government rather than simply a smaller one.38 2. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change. The second stage of a public reputation crisis is that negative perceptions of government begin to function as stereotypes. In politics, we usually think of stereotypes with respect to social groups, such as negative stereotypes about racial minorities, women, or the poor, but a stereotype can also be applied to an object, idea, or institution; a stereotype is just an oversimplified perception about something. Humans use stereotypes in our everyday lives, in order to simplify and speed up information processing. Rather than starting from scratch each time we encounter something or someone new, we use stereotypes to infer the sorts of traits and characteristics that a person or thing is likely to have. Just as within groups of people, there is a great deal of variation across different government agencies, levels of government, publicsector workers, and policy domains. But when we hold broadly negative stereotypes of government, just as when we hold broadly negative stereotypes of social groups, we become more likely to ignore this variation. The result is that, even when we encounter instances of good government performance, we are likely to avoid, forget, or otherwise

13

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reason away the inconsistency with what we believe to be true. In this way, negative perceptions of government remain durable and can extend even into policy domains and public debates where government provision is in reality a more efficient, effective, or even more ethical choice. In the following chapters, I show that Americans engage in this type of reputation-motivated reasoning when it comes to the quality of public and private service provision; essentially, they systematically perceive the world in a way that confirms their negative stereotypes of government. For instance, in chapter 4, I describe a series of experiments in which we asked respondents to read a short newspaper article about a fictional town. In these experiments, we described a specific example of a program, service, or institution offered in that town; in various experiments, this was a school, prison, emergency medical response, or garbage collection service. We then randomly assigned whether the service was described as being of either high or low quality. However, we did not give respondents any information about whether the service had been provided by government or a private firm. What we found was that those who held broadly negative beliefs about government were systematically more likely to infer that the low- quality service was publicly provided. Conversely, when we gave people information about the service provider (either public or private) but did not tell them anything about the quality of that service, those who held negative beliefs about government were more likely to assume that the high- quality service was provided by the private sector. In chapter 5, I find that the same pattern holds when it comes to people’s own experiences with government. When individuals personally experience a program or service and believe it to be low quality, they are likely to assume that it is provided by government. This is true irrespective of how it is actually provided, and it is also independent of the objective quality of public versus private service provision in their community. The reverse inference is made when individuals encounter a program or service and perceive it to be of higher quality. In this case, they are more likely to assume it is provided privately. The consequence of this biased inference is that, even in the face of government successes, citizens’ beliefs about the low quality of government are difficult to change. Perversely, this process of motivated reasoning can actually result in increased support for privatizing high- quality public services. In chapter 5, I show that personal experience with public service provision affects whether people support privatizing that service. However, the 14

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result of reputation-motivated reasoning is that these effects are in a counterintuitive direction: someone receiving a public service that she perceives to be of very high quality mistakenly believes she is receiving a high- quality private service. As a result, she becomes more supportive of having that service turned over to a private firm. This aspect of the public reputation crisis poses a sizable challenge to the most basic tenets of democratic engagement and accountability. For democratic participation to be meaningful, citizens must be able to make informed choices about whether to maintain or expand government programs, or whether instead to support privatization and a shrinking public sector. In the face of a reputation crisis, however, citizens may not have that ability. When citizens cannot correctly identify the source of the services they are provided, they cannot correctly allocate credit and blame for the quality of those services. Nor can they make informed choices about whether to maintain current modes of service provision or seek instead to change the status quo. 3. The public reputation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The final characteristic of a public reputation crisis—like a reputation crisis in the private sector—is that it can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As one public relations consultant writes, “Whether the impact is immediate or sustained over months and years, a crisis affects stakeholders within and outside of a company. Customers cancel orders. Employees raise questions. Directors are questioned. Shareholders get antsy. Competitors sense opportunity. Government agencies and regulators come knocking. Interest groups smell blood. Lawyers are not far behind.”39 The same is true when the reputation crisis is a public one. For government, just as for private firms, the consequences of reputation can be far-reaching. Specifically, just as in the private sector, government’s reputation can directly affect the consumption (or “take-up”) choices individuals make. When citizens lose confidence in government, believing that public services are of consistently lower quality than private alternatives, they are likely to make use of public programs only when a private service provider is either unavailable or unaffordable. When a private option is feasible and available, they will (quite reasonably, given their beliefs) prefer that private alternative. As I show in both chapters 5 and 7, this can occur even when public provision is objectively better than the private option, or when public and private options are equivalent. It is easy to see how this kind of opting out can result in a 15

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vicious cycle. If large enough proportions of citizens choose to opt out, turning to the private sector as an alternative to public-sector provision, it can affect the long-term viability of public programs as a whole. Consider research on public and private transportation options, much of which has focused on the environmental and labor impacts of Uber and Lyft. When large numbers of people in a crowded city eschew mass transit, the result can be more traffic congestion, more accidents, and more air pollution. Speculating on this possibility, the author of a recent report on ride-sharing services concluded that “these services currently facilitate a shift away from more sustainable modes towards low- occupancy vehicles in major cities.”40 In the throes of a public reputation crisis, individuals who believe public transportation is generally deficient— subway cars are dirty; city buses do not run on schedule—might become more likely to choose a Lyft or Uber instead of continuing to commute by mass transit. In a recent survey of those who participate in paid ride-sharing across seven US cities, 6 percent said they ride the bus less frequently since starting to ride-hail. When asked why they had changed their transportation behavior, their most common answers were that they believed public transit was too slow, schedules were too limited, and service was unreliable.41 Similarly, a survey of Boston ride-sharing app users found that fully 40 percent said they would have taken mass transit if the private alternative wasn’t available. The majority said they had chosen ridesharing because it offered more speed and convenience. “The responses to those questions provide strong evidence,” concluded a Boston-area transportation planner, “that [companies like Uber and Lyft] are pulling from, not complementing, public transit.”42 When large numbers of people opt out of public services, it can diminish the actual quality of public-sector transportation. The most direct way this can occur is through reduced funding available to public institutions: every Uber and Lyft rider who opts out of public transportation represents lost revenue from bus fares and train tickets. The aggregated result is that there is less money available to keep trains and buses in good condition and running on time. If this continues, eventually there will be increasingly frequent delays and service reductions. In essence, the perception that public service is inferior can help produce this reality. We can see the same possibility when we return to the case of public education. Citizens’ beliefs about the inferior quality of public education reflect the rhetoric of America’s political elites. Republicans have long been the more ardent supporters of moving the country’s edu16

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cational system toward a broader array of choices—including private schools, charter schools, and religious education. For instance, President Trump bemoaned the state of American public schools in his inaugural address, and his appointment of Betsy DeVos, formerly head of the Alliance for School Choice, as secretary of education clearly signaled his commitment to turning public funds into private vouchers. In campaigns and policy debates, conservatives at both the state and national levels have been outspoken advocates for school privatization and choice. But while this remains broadly true, impassioned criticism of public school quality extends far across the aisle. President Obama also promoted education reform during his administration, on the grounds that the public system was failing. In a 2009 speech, he described the American education system as underperforming in almost every regard: “Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”43 Calling charters “laboratories of innovation,” he urged states to remove limits on school choice even in places where public schools were performing well.44 That same year, he made $4.35 billion available to states for education. To be eligible, though, they were required to increase the availability of charter schools and commit to closing low-performing public schools. In the coming chapters, I will argue that this sort of rhetoric has consequences not just for how citizens think about the quality of public versus private but also about their decisions to engage with public and private institutions. When it comes to the decisions parents make about where to send their own children to school, a 2017 survey concludes that “traditional public schools don’t command vast loyalty.”45 Only about a third of parents (31 percent) say they would pick a public school over a private school if cost and location were not issues, and just 17 percent and 14 percent say they would pick a public school rather than a charter or religious school, respectively. Certainly, a complex alchemy of factors predicts why some parents choose public and others choose private school. However, in data from the Gallup Work and Education Survey, I find that parents who have more negative views of government are about 13 percentage points more likely to report having sent their kids to a private rather than public school (a statistically significant result).46 Even once we account for political partisanship, ideology, and urban versus suburban and rural, once we take into account parental education and household income, and once we control for a range of other factors, including 17

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gender, age, race, ethnicity, and marital status, the strong relationship between dissatisfaction with government and the choice to opt out of public school persists.47 In a reputation crisis, these individual choices can translate into consequential effects that go far beyond individual families. Most basically, when parents take their children out of public schools, the long-term result will be a reduction in the per-pupil funds allocated to their local public school district as part of many state educationfunding formulas. Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former high school principal in New York State, puts it succinctly: “Charter schools drain tax dollars from your community schools. . . . Vouchers drain state tax dollars, creating deficits, or the need for tax increases.” A recent study found that some school districts lose upwards of $60 million a year to charter schools. A school superintendent in Pennsylvania recently estimated that $20 million could be saved annually if charter school students came back to the public school system. And according to one estimate, the cost of school vouchers to taxpayers in Indiana topped $131 million in just one year.48 This can have profound implications for public school kids, by reducing the amount of money available for teachers’ salaries, administration, instructional staff support, and other operating costs.49 Compared to parents that opt out, those who send their eldest child to public school are about 50 percent more likely to report that their school is having financial difficulties, and nearly twice as likely to say the school is making major spending cuts that will hurt the quality of education.50 To be sure, money alone is not a panacea for the problems of public education. However, recent research finds that additional school funding, when spent wisely, is associated with large increases in tests scores among low-income students, as well as higher wages and lower incidence of adult poverty.51 As the author Jonathan Kozol notes, describing his frustration with being asked if additional funding for public schools will really make a difference: Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don’t even send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. . . . Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and

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thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor. 52

The resources parents remove from the public school system when they opt out go beyond solely monetary, though, and can also result in more immediate effects. When parents leave for more private pastures, they are less likely to contribute to the public school PTA, attend public school fundraisers, or volunteer time in the public school classroom. This can deprive public schools of enrichment programs and extra tutoring, as well as other programs and services that are supported by parental contributions and engagement. This points to a second way that public reputations may become self-fulfilling: they can change the composition of people receiving public-sector benefits in ways that make it increasingly difficult for government to perform well. For instance, one of the strongest predictors of school readiness and performance is parental education. If parents with higher levels of education are systematically more likely to opt out of the public system, as data suggest is true, it might dramatically alter the composition of public school classrooms. Specifically, when wealthier parents choose private or charter schools, they leave lower-income students disproportionately represented in public schools. These students, especially those who suffer the highest degree of poverty, are more likely to have both mild and severe learning disabilities, which require additional resources to competently address.53 This sorting of students is encouraged by the fact that private and charter schools do not have to provide specialized services to students with disabilities. These children—who, again, may need additional and sometimes quite expensive resources— are disproportionately left to public schools, which, in contrast, are required under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to meet the specifications of each student’s Individual Education Plan (IEP). In healthcare, too, those who have more money frequently have more choices. Individuals with the means can choose what hospital they will go to when they require surgery or sophisticated medical tests. But if wealthier individuals are systematically more likely to choose private for-profit over public hospitals— again, based on the assumption that private is always better—public hospitals are left to disproportionately treat the (relatively more expensive) individuals that private hospitals can turn away. As a result, public hospitals will struggle to ensure adequate staffing, acquire cutting- edge medical equipment, and

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maintain standards of care, increasing the probability that private care options become objectively superior— and reinforcing citizens’ belief that this is inherently true. The belief becomes the reality; as resources are removed and costs rise, the actual quality of services provided by the public sector declines. Finally, there is one other way that reputation can feed back into the political process: in the coming chapters, I suggest that opting out can short- circuit the process of political learning. Choosing a private program or service over a public-sector option is not, in and of itself, problematic. However, one important consequence is that it precludes personal experiences with public programs and policies that might help to clarify the kinds of benefits government can provide and the role of the public sector in solving social problems. It seems fairly intuitive that citizens’ beliefs about government are at least in part a function of their personal experience with public services. Rhetoric from politicians and stories in the news might occasionally paint a rosy picture of how government works, but if I wait in line for three hours trying to get my license renewed at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or if the package I send to my mother gets lost by the Postal Service, or if my social worker is being furloughed on the day I need to pick up my welfare check, I might reasonably conclude that government services are not being effectively and efficiently delivered. Through their interaction with public agencies and programs, citizens glean information about how government works—how (in)competent it is, or how (in)efficient.54 Americans themselves certainly believe this to be true. When asked what informs their evaluations of government performance, individuals reported primarily relying on the stories about government they read and hear in newspapers, on television, and online (52 percent) and what they hear from family and friends (9 percent), but they also reported relying on their own personal experiences with government (34 percent). Moreover, on the whole, about 60 percent say they have not been dissatisfied with their recent personal interactions with government programs and agencies.55 Yet when individuals disengage from public provision, they are deprived of this potentially important moment of political socialization. Opting out means people miss out on whatever benefits government is offering, but also that they do not learn about government from their own involvement in this particular policy venue—knowledge that might be at odds with the overwhelmingly negative messages about government that dominate our political discourse. 20

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In the coming chapters, I outline a case of political learning from personal experience using the example of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In chapter 6, I examine support for healthcare reform. Not surprisingly, both party and ideology are highly predictive of public attitudes toward the ACA. However, even accounting for political partisanship and other factors, I find that citizens’ beliefs about the general efficiency and competence of government are significant determinants of whether individuals support or oppose the government’s health reform package. In fact, simply emphasizing the public aspects of the ACA, as opposed to stressing the role of private insurers or publicprivate partnerships, decreases support among those who hold more negative views of government. Importantly, it also decreases the extent to which individuals express interest in making use of the health insurance marketplaces that the ACA made available. These intentions are borne out in data on actual insurance enrollment. In chapter 7, I show that both conservatives and Republicans have been less likely than liberals or Democrats to sign up for insurance through the government’s newly established health marketplaces. Even within the subset of Republicans, however, it is those who hold more negative views of government who appear most likely to opt out when they perceive the ACA markets to be associated with government. Just as in other policy domains, from public transit to public schools, if enough individuals abstain from signing up for medical insurance or choose to purchase insurance options only off-marketplace, it can threaten the viability of the marketplace as a whole. This is especially true if those who opt out have higher incomes, which is strongly associated with being in better health and therefore less expensive to insure.56 In addition, though, those who opt out of participation in the marketplace do not have an opportunity to learn about government through their personal experience with the ACA. As I show in chapter  8, this has important implications for what they come to believe about healthcare reform, and ultimately how they will come to view the role of government in ensuring access to care.

Restoring the Public Reputation In the corporate world, classic examples of a reputation crisis abound. Consider the case of Chipotle Mexican Grill. Chipotle is one of the largest Mexican-themed fast-food chain restaurants in America. With 21

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early investment from McDonald’s, what started as thirteen stores in 1998 quickly expanded into a “$22 billion burrito empire” and became a “Wall Street darling.”57 (On the day Chipotle debuted its IPO, the Wall Street Journal called its stock “spicier than a three-alarm hot sauce.”58) In 2015, however, the company suffered a major public relations issue when an outbreak of E. coli was linked to several of its stores. More than a year later, it was still unclear whether the company would be able to bounce back. At the end of 2016, Chipotle was still struggling to persuade customers that the restaurant had taken aggressive enough action to ensure that its food was safe; the chain announced sales for the year that were down 13 percent from the year before, marking its first annual sales decline since it went public in 2006.59 As one news outlet reported, “Since the scandal hit, Chipotle’s same store sales have remained sharply in negative territory even as the burrito chain has doubled down on promotions and reassured customers about its new food safety practices.”60 Restoring a tarnished reputation after a serious crisis can be enormously difficult. In the final chapters of this book, I turn my attention to how government and citizens might begin to rebuild the public reputation. This is not a new concern: in 1970s America, amid faltering public trust in government, political scientist Jack Citrin wrote that “the government’s credit rating has steadily declined as a result of a disastrous foreign investment and growing consumer resistance to its ‘line’ of products. Neither the country’s present management nor its most prominent rivals inspire public confidence. How, then,” he asked, “can the political system rebuild its depleted reserves of political trust, the basis of future growth and stability?” Citrin’s answer would largely downplay the severity of the crisis at that time, suggesting that “‘one good season,’ better advertising, new blood in the boardroom or product innovation” might be sufficient, and that calls for “a drastic restructuring of the regime’s organization and operating procedures [as] the only alternative to liquidation” were wholly premature.61 More than four decades later, though, it is no longer clear whether dissatisfaction with government is aimed at particular parties and incumbents, or whether it has become more generalized to the nation’s institutions of democracy as a whole. Certainly, as in the 1970s, distrust of particular individuals or the party in office remains a major part of the problem, as evidenced by the fact that trust in government among Democrats and Republicans appears to rise and fall depending on who occupies the White House. But the evidence I present throughout this book suggests that the problem may run far deeper now than 22

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in previous eras, and thus cannot be fi xed with new elections and new policies alone. This contention is bolstered by the muted effects of recent efforts at government reform, which I describe in chapter 12. As a result of these efforts of the 1990s and 2000s—from Bill Clinton’s campaign to “reinvent government” to George W. Bush’s public management and e-government reforms—taxpayers have saved a great deal of money. Yet Americans still describe government as too big, corrupt, confused, and incompetent.62 This suggests that reforms aimed at improving government efficiency are not enough; in addition, elites must work harder to communicate the good work of government. Instead, elites tend to downplay government’s virtues in favor of emphasizing when government fails; over the past few decades, American political elites have harshly derided government as wasteful, incompetent, inefficient, and unable to effectively meet its goals. Conversely, elites frequently oversell the private market’s advantages. As a result, when it comes to perceptions of government, the costs of government often loom larger than what we stand to gain. Citizens are quick to gloss over the pitfalls of the private market; for-profit companies brought us the iPhone and Air Jordans but have also contributed to housing instability (e.g., subprime lending by private mortgage firms, which led to the sharp spike in home foreclosures in 2008), environmental degradation (e.g., negligence on the part of energy giant BP, which resulted in the discharge of more than 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010), rising income inequality (e.g,. large private firms who have allowed the wage gap between CEOs and average employee compensation to grow substantially over time), and other social ills. In chapter 9, I suggest that one way agencies and elected officials might work toward countering government stereotypes is to more directly confront crises when they (perhaps inevitably) occur. Drawing on lessons from the private sector, where crisis communication has long been a subject of interest, I lay out a set of recommendations for how these events can be successfully navigated—which primarily boil down to taking responsibility and committing to swift and specific reform. Despite these fairly intuitive propositions, however, I describe all too many instances in which government has failed to take even these basic steps. In chapter 10, I then empirically test the consequences of different crisis communication strategies. I find that the way political elites respond to crisis—whether they accept responsibility or instead take 23

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a defensive position; whether they offer specific steps to ensure that problems will not recur or instead opt to put off concrete reforms— can have a significant effect on how citizens perceive potentially damaging events. Specifically, I find that proactively addressing crisis shapes how citizens perceive a negative event, how likely they believe the government is to resolve the problem, and how satisfied they are with the government response. More broadly, though, I suggest that elites can work to rebuild the public reputation by helping individuals see the connection between government activities and the common good. In the final chapter, I turn to the collective responsibilities of citizenship and the ways in which our individual fates are more inextricably tied together than we sometimes care to admit. We live in a time when citizens need and demand a wide array of public goods: clean air, clean water, and safe communities. For a host of reasons, though, private markets may not automatically produce these outcomes, if left to their own devices. For instance, because they are motivated primarily by profit, private companies are likely to produce more pollution than might be optimal, or to set the cost of education too high for many citizens to afford. Society as a whole then bears the costs of environmental degradation, or loses out on the shared benefits of a more educated populace. We rely on government to address these and other types of market failure, through tools like regulation, taxes, and subsidies. Yet when citizens lose faith in government’s ability to deliver on its promises, they become increasingly likely to withdraw their support for public actions and public goods. Many Americans also believe that there are at least some basic necessities that no individual should be denied, even if he or she cannot afford to purchase them: life-saving medicine, primary and secondary education, access to shelter, and food for subsistence. There is similarly wide consensus that we have a shared responsibility to keep citizens safe, to protect our interests internationally, and to prepare for natural disasters, viral outbreaks, and other emergencies. This accords with our understanding of the fundamental protections that must be afforded to citizens of a developed democracy. Thus, when some citizens cannot afford to pay market prices for these goods, or when a market-based option is not widely available, we often turn to government to provide goods directly or to help subsidize universal access. Yet the conversation about privatization remains primarily about efficiency, rather than about the broader array of noneconomic costs and benefits—like

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equity, equality, and dignity—that might be implicated when privatization arrangements are made. It goes without saying that government must address waste and inefficiency in delivering public services. However, in addition to improving the objective quality of service delivery, government has another critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. As I will argue here, the reputation of government is itself an impediment to the ability of government to achieve the common good. Until public officials address the public reputation crisis, efforts to eliminate or privatize even the most critical public services are likely to persist.

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TWO

A Brief History of Public Reputation When and how did the reputation crisis in American politics take hold? In this chapter, I provide an account of how public discourse about the efficacy and efficiency of government has changed since the early twentieth century. While this review is necessarily cursory, covering as it does such a wide swath of political history in just a single chapter, it is sufficient to show how elite anti-government rhetoric became a fi xture in American political life. Americans have always maintained an uneasy relationship with their government. The founders were intensely concerned with limiting centralized power, and it is not an overstatement to say that our national reverence for individualism and self- determination is culturally sacrosanct. Yet for most of the nation’s modern history, leaders of all political stripes professed their belief that government had an important role to play in helping citizens achieve their common goals of prosperity and security. For instance, James Wilson’s 1791 Lectures on Law described a legitimate government as one that is “formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members.”1 Over one hundred years later, Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, first published in 1909, made the case that a robust and centralized government was the only route to achieving the nation’s destiny: “No voluntary association of individuals, resourceful and disinterested though they be, is competent to assume the responsibility [of achieving ‘the Promise of American Life’]. The problem belongs to 26

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the American national democracy, and its solution must be attempted chiefly by means of official national action.”2 This recognition that the fulfillment of the American “promise” necessitated a sufficiently robust state continued into the following decades, and in some quarters began to expand to include recognition of positive rights. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously spoke for the first time about a New Deal for the American people— a deal he hoped would lift the economy out of the Depression and provide financial security to the American public.3 While recognizing that “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes,” Roosevelt still believed that it was morally imperative for government to take action in the face of social ills. “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference,” he argued.4 With this came a sense that government had a responsibility to act on a wide range of problems, from the environment to education: “Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools,” FDR would later opine.5 Most importantly, the market forces of competition were deemed by Roosevelt to be “useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”6 The end of World War II brought with it a renewed sense that government had a substantial role to play in ensuring American prosperity. Even during this heyday of government, though, through the New Deal and the Second World War, the intellectual seeds of libertarianism were starting to take root. In a 1922 essay, the influential writer H. L. Mencken described the “ideal government of all reflective men” as being “one which barely escapes being no government at all.”7 By the second half of the twentieth century, an anti-government, libertarian movement began to gain steam, influencing the positions taken by Barry Goldwater and others such that, by the 1960s, anti-government rhetoric had reemerged on the national political stage; by the 1980s, it had taken center stage. Most critically, it had also crossed the partisan aisle. Urging deregulation and tax reductions in his 1978 State of the Union address, Democratic president Jimmy Carter told Americans, “We need patience and good will, but we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government. Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce 27

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inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.”8 Just a few years later, faced with “the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history,” Republican president Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address included a line that would go down in history as one of the most boldly anti-government statements made by an American president: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”9 This sentiment would come to characterize elite rhetoric for the ensuing decades, as the reputation crisis began to take hold.

The Ethical Argument for Government Action In 1932, President Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with tradition by accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in person at the national convention in Chicago, rather than waiting the customary few weeks to be officially notified of his victory. In his acceptance speech on the grand stage, Roosevelt made a forceful case for government. In particular, he argued that government must play a key role in the economy. “Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws — sacred, inviolable, unchangeable— cause panics which no one could prevent,” he chided. “But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”10 Within the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s presidency, the president and his “Brain Trust” of advisors had proposed fifteen New Deal proposals to Congress. Roosevelt’s ambitious legislative agenda continued for the next five years, ushering in a litany of new government agencies that, according to historian Bradford A. Lee, “strained the resources of the alphabet—AAA, CAB, CCC, CWA, FCA, FCC, FDIC, FERA, FHA, FSA, HOLC, NLRB, NRA, NYA, PWA, REA, SEC, TVA, WPA.” With Democratic members of Congress generally in favor of the New Deal and Republican members resigned to its success, bills initially passed through the legislature easily, some “after only token debate.”11 Many proposals, in fact, were spearheaded by Congress itself.12 In a 1933 fireside chat, the president made clear that the New Deal was not an attempt at government control of the economy but, rather, an opportunity for government to work in concert with business: “It is wholly wrong to call the measure that we have taken Government control of farming, control of industry, and control of transportation. 28

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It is rather a partnership between Government and farming and industry and transportation . . . a partnership in planning and partnership to see that the plans are carried out.”13 But talk of public-private partnerships waned by 1936, when government alone was the hero of the new Democratic Party. Reflecting on the previous three years, the party’s platform held that the nation’s “recovery in all the basic values of life and the reestablishment of the American way of living has been brought about by humanizing the policies of the Federal Government.”14 Roosevelt saw wild success at the ballot that year, garnering more than 60 percent of the vote.15 In a radio address marking the third anniversary of the Social Security Act, Roosevelt suggested that the success of the nation demanded a proactive government: “Our Government in fulfilling an obvious obligation to the citizens of the country has been doing so only because the citizens require action from their Representatives. If the people, during these years, had chosen a reactionary Administration or a ‘do nothing’ Congress, Social Security would still be in the conversational stage— a beautiful dream which might come true in the dim distant future.” He forcefully argued that the program was both effective at achieving critical goals and efficient in its execution: “The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.”16 In contrast, Republicans pushed back against the idea that so much government intervention was desirable, warning that government expansion was putting Americans at risk. “We dedicate ourselves to the preservation of their political liberty, their individual opportunity and their character as free citizens, which today for the first time are threatened by Government itself,” the party’s 1936 platform read. Government under Roosevelt was “characterized by shameful waste, and general financial irresponsibility.” Civil servants were “inexperienced and incompetent” and as a result, “the Federal Government has never presented such a picture of confusion and inefficiency.”17 Despite Roosevelt’s overwhelming support at the ballot box, voters also became less sanguine about his New Deal policies— or, rather, how much they cost. In September of 1935, Gallup conducted its first public opinion poll, questioning a national cross-section of Americans. Sixty percent of respondents believed government was spending too much on relief and recovery efforts, while just 9 percent thought 29

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expenditures were “too little.”18 The crisis of confidence only worsened in response to the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937, when unemployment spiked to somewhere between 13 and 19 percent.19 Even with this waning support for New Deal policies, though, there remained strong public support for the basic idea of government intervention. The ethical arguments Roosevelt had made proved durable and would have an important effect on Americans’ views of public responsibility for poverty reduction. At the same time, many Keynesian economists would argue that this second recession was the result of prematurely retracting government intervention, particularly those interventions that had aimed to pump money into the economy. Eventually, the New Deal was overshadowed by American involvement in World War II, which dramatically expanded government spending,20 eradicated unemployment, and lifted the United States out of depression.21 But the New Deal’s legacy remained, and not only through extant programs such as Social Security and the FDIC. As historian David M. Kennedy argues, the most consequential result of the New Deal was that “ever after, Americans assumed that the federal government had not merely a role, but a major responsibility, in ensuring the health of the economy and the welfare of citizens.”22

Roosevelt and World War II In September of 1939, Germany launched its first Blitzkrieg in Poland, and World War II commenced. Support for American involvement was not high, however. Two years earlier, following an October 1937 speech in which Roosevelt proposed that the US “quarantine” aggressor nations and engage in “positive endeavors to preserve peace,” advocates of neutrality expressed clear opposition to international intervention. “Crusade, if you must,” a Boston Herald editorial said to President Roosevelt, “but for the sake of several millions of American mothers, confine your crusading to the continental limits of America!”23 Public sentiment was still leaning toward nonintervention three years later, when a 1940 Gallup poll asked Americans whether they would vote “to go into the war or stay out of the war.” Only 15 percent said they would go in; 85 percent chose to stay out.24 Perhaps the best-known group opposing US involvement in World War II was the America First Committee, which formed on September  4, 1940, after a series of informal discussions among students at Yale University.25 In short order, the committee attracted more than 30

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eight hundred thousand members from across the United States, including the aviator Charles Lindbergh, whom FDR famously labeled a Nazi.26 While, as historian Wayne S. Cole writes, much of this resistance came from parents “who were horrified by the mental image of their sons mangled on a foreign battlefield,” partisan opposition also played a role; most of the national committee and executive committee members with known political affiliations were Republican.27 The Republican Party emphasized its opposition to US intervention in its 1940 platform, placing “full responsibility for our unpreparedness and for the consequent danger of involvement in war” with Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Our national economy,” the platform said, was “the true basis of America’s defense” and “must be free of unwarranted government interference.” The best hope to protect the nation was not to declare war but to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the US economy.28 As the war wore on, however, the public grew increasingly open to American intervention.29 Public opinion solidified with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, after which the vast majority of Americans immediately accepted US retaliation “as an uncontroversial matter of national interest.”30 On December 8, 1941, one day after the attack, America declared war on Japan and fully entered World War II. Congressional support was near unanimous; only one member of Congress, the lifelong pacifist Jeannette Rankin, voted against the war declaration.31 That same day, America First issued a statement urging its followers “to give their support to the war effort of this country until the conflict with Japan is brought to a successful conclusion.” The national committee voted to dissolve itself four days later.32 Following Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt began to talk more expansively about the ethical role of government. Gone was his New Deal– era rhetoric of government promoting social welfare; instead, he talked of government safeguarding the national interest. “Government would protect the ‘human dignity’ of the worker,” writes historian James T. Sparrow, “but this was now a matter of national interest rather than social justice, since ‘the workers provide the human power that turns out the destroyers, and the planes and tanks.’” This new depiction of government resonated with the American public, and federal legitimacy grew more during World War II than in any other part of the twentieth century.33 Support for a powerful federal government remained strong after the war ended in 1945. As millions of soldiers returned to civilian life, a September poll found that 79 percent of Americans believed “it should 31

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be up to the government” to guarantee jobs for all who were willing to work.34 The following year, 73 percent held that “the government should provide for all people who have no other means of obtaining a living.”35 In the course of just a few years, the idea that government had the responsibility and capacity to address important national problems had solidified within the American psyche.36 The decade that followed brought with it a heyday for trust in government. The war was over, America was prosperous, and “big government” was generally viewed as a good thing. In 1952, a survey of students at one prominent liberal arts college found that only 26 percent agreed that “the best government is the one which governs least.” The majority preferred that government play a stronger role.37 In a 1954 poll, about half of Americans thought government was doing the right amount when dealing with unemployment, education, and housing, while another 27 percent thought it could do even more; a mere 10 percent of Americans thought government should do less.38 One particular area of public investment that appeared to capture the American imagination during this period was science and innovation. The establishment of a new agency dedicated to funding and administering scientific research was first proposed in the mid-1940s by Vannevar Bush, a brilliant scientific mind who ran the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development and had the ear of President Harry S. Truman.39 In his famous 35-page report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” Bush argued that “science is a proper concern of government. . . . Without scientific progress the national health would deteriorate; without scientific progress we could not hope for improvement in our standard of living or for an increased number of jobs for our citizens; and without scientific progress we could not have maintained our liberties against tyranny.” Private industry alone could not be expected to adequately cultivate research and development in the many important areas in which it was needed, including “military problems, agriculture, housing, public health, certain medical research, and research involving expensive capital facilities beyond the capacity of private institutions.” Accordingly, these areas of research “should be advanced by active Government support.”40 The proposal for a National Science Foundation (NSF) was supported by broad consensus. The Republican Party’s 1948 platform held that government “should take all needed steps . . . to promote scientific research.” Military leaders in the War and Navy Departments threw their support behind the NSF, sending letters to the chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs advocating for government-sponsored 32

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scientific research.41 The private sector also expressed enthusiasm. In a national survey of two hundred manufacturers, 77 percent agreed that “federally supported scientific research [was] needed by industry,” and the majority favored the creation of a centralized scientific agency to administer this research.42 In 1950, a law creating the NSF passed with at least two-thirds support in both the House and the Senate. Throughout the subsequent decade, enthusiasm for government remained high. Three in four Americans thought the government in Washington could be trusted to do what was right most or all of the time, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, made dozens of positive references to government in his 1953 State of the Union address. While making clear that he believed in “incentives that inspire creative initiative in our economy” and the removal of “procedural obstacles to profitable trade,” he argued for a “strong Federal program in the field of resource development” and noted the importance of government’s role in labor “mediation and conciliation.” He went on to say that his administration was “profoundly aware of two great needs born of our living in a complex industrial economy. First, the individual citizen must have safeguards against personal disaster inflicted by forces beyond his control; second, the welfare of the people demands effective and economical performance by the Government of certain indispensable social services.” He therefore called on the federal government to expand insurance support for the elderly, to address inequalities in funding for education, and to bolster the Food and Drug Administration’s programs to protect consumer health.43 Enthusiastic support for a strong federal government would continue into the next decade. For instance, the public was overwhelmingly supportive of America’s space exploration program. In 1961, 72 percent of Americans agreed it was important for the United States to be ahead of Russia in this area of scientific discovery.44 In a joint session of Congress in May of that year, President John F. Kennedy famously promised that the United States would land a man on the moon within the decade. Public funds were poured into NASA and its lunar landing program, and more than four hundred thousand public employees and private contractors worked together to achieve a “giant leap for mankind.”

The Rhetorical Tides Turn To be clear, not everyone shared a glowing view of government. The libertarian movement began gaining steam in the 1950s, albeit slowly; 33

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the term “libertarian” was not formally suggested as a label for movement adherents until 1955.45 The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, a prominent student organization that challenged federal political power and promoted individualism, was founded in 1953, with future libertarian icon William F. Buckley serving as its first president.46 In 1957, Ayn Rand published her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, inspiring generations of libertarian thinkers. (Former house speaker Paul Ryan famously remarked in 2005 that “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”47) In 1962, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom formalized both the normative and proscriptive framework on which a new political agenda would be constructed. The book outlined a clear and compelling case against government intervention in the economy, pushing back against rising federal expenditures and challenging Keynesian economics— a framework favoring a managed market economy, with government fiscal policy playing an important role in stabilizing markets. Friedman argued that government was often both ineffective and inefficient, and that, in fact, a free market and limited government were necessary preconditions for a free and fair democracy.48 In the years that followed Kennedy’s bold announcement about an American moon landing, the public began to lose confidence that America could actually accomplish what the president had promised. In 1961, half of those who expressed an opinion had believed that the United States would be first to land on the moon.49 By 1963, only 32 percent of Americans believed America would fulfill this goal. Public concern also began to rise about the accompanying price tag for a mission to space. By 1967, only half of the public said the moonshot was worth its $4 billion cost, and nearly half openly opposed the specific goal of a manned mission to the moon.50 Three years before the end of the decade, only a third of Americans continued to believe that it was important for America to beat Russia to the moon. With the assassination of John F. Kennedy the following year, Americans’ trust in government began a precipitous decline from which it has yet to recover. That the tide of sentiment had turned would become glaringly obvious following March 16, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. “We are citizens of the richest and most fortunate nation in the history of the world,” he told Congress, yet “there are millions of Americans— one fifth of our people—who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the gates of opportunity have been closed.”51 To lift these millions of 34

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Americans up, Johnson proposed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a five-part plan that would, according to the bill’s Declaration of Purpose, “eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.”52 As Johnson put it in a 1965 address to Congress, such a program would allow the poor to become “taxpayers instead of taxeaters.”53 Democratic members of the House and Senate largely followed Johnson’s lead and backed the Economic Opportunity Act, as did labor unions. Additional support came from civil rights groups such as the National Urban League and the NAACP, social welfare organizations, and the National Council of Churches of Christ.54 Much of the American public shared this continued commitment to government action against poverty; in September of 1964, 73 percent of Americans agreed that “the federal government has a responsibility to try to do away with poverty in this country,”55 and five years later, that same percentage continued to favor “an all- out effort by the federal government to get rid of poverty in this country.”56 Increasingly, though, concerns were being raised— even in liberalleaning quarters—that the government might not be capable of successfully achieving its poverty-reduction goals. George Meany, the president of the AFL- CIO, called the Johnson bill a “step forward” in the effort to fight poverty, but he feared its lack of public works programs would result in continued unemployment for poor Americans. The president of the United Automobile Workers, Walter P. Reuther, agreed, testifying in support of the bill’s passage despite fearing it would be “wholly inadequate” at ending poverty.57 While those on the left expressed concern that the Economic Opportunity Act would not do enough to reduce poverty, the broader business community feared that it would go too far— spending too much money and increasing government beyond its proper scope.58 Many of these criticisms focused not on only on the right role of government but also on whether government could realistically achieve its specified goals. The National Association of Manufacturers predicted that the program would not reduce poverty or create new jobs and the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association called the bill “an impractical, costly, highly dangerous political scheme to force through Congress many old, discredited programs and several new extreme plans for a welfare state.” Carl H. Madden of the US Chamber of Commerce challenged the bill in a congressional hearing, arguing that it was inefficient: it was duplicative of existing federal programs and could be enacted by 35

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local governments without additional financial support from Washington. The American Farm Bureau Federation took this criticism a step further, claiming the bill would lead to “stabilized, Governmentdirected and subsidized poverty.”59 Most Republicans were also in opposition, calling the Economic Opportunity Act an “election-year gimmick” that would expand federal government without addressing the root causes of American poverty.60 The 1964 Republican Party platform warned that the war on poverty “would dangerously centralize Federal controls and bypass effective state, local and private programs.”61 When the bill finally came to a vote, two-thirds of Republican senators voted against it, as did 145 Republicans in the House of Representatives. Nearly half of Southern Democrats joined the Republican-led opposition.62 Notably, many Republicans did continue to support a role for government in preventing and reducing poverty. Republicans seemed less concerned with the idea of public-sector poverty alleviation than with the actual efficiency and effectiveness of government implementation. In a hearing before the House Subcommittee on the War on Poverty Program, New Jersey congressman Peter Frelinghuysen Jr. explained that his problem was with the structure and contents of this particular bill, not with its “basic objectives”: “I am very much in favor of the federal government bearing its fair share of alleviating poverty,” he explained.63 In fact, the Republican Party embraced antipoverty initiatives in its 1964 platform, including vocational rehabilitation programs and incentives for employers to hire teenagers. “Where Federal initiative is properly involved to relieve or prevent misfortune or meet overpowering need,” the platform read, “it will be the Republican way to move promptly and energetically, and wherever possible to provide assistance of a kind enabling the individual to gain or regain the capability to make his own way and to have a fair chance to achieve his own goals.”64 The resolve that government could effectively solve large social problems would be tested by the 1965 Medicare Amendment to the Social Security Act. The bill’s initially limited focus on seniors was intentional. Since 1915, liberal reformers had repeatedly failed to push a broader version of national health insurance for all Americans through Congress;65 by focusing on “the aged,” Medicare proponents believed they could “capitalize on the sympathetic reputation of the elderly as a group deserving of government help and in need through no fault of their own.”66 Then, after the program had solidified itself within the

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national psyche and proven its worth, it could be expanded to include other populations beyond senior citizens. “We all saw insurance for the elderly as a fallback position, which we advocated solely because it seemed to have the best chance politically,” explained Robert Ball, the head of the Social Security Administration from 1962 to 1973 and one of the people responsible for crafting the Medicare strategy. “We expected Medicare to be the fi rst step toward universal national health insurance, perhaps with ‘Kiddiecare’ as the next step.”67 Pushback over healthcare expansion marked a pivotal shift in political rhetoric over the relationship of government to the private market. Opposition to government-provided healthcare came from the American Medical Association (AMA) and a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats.68 Stoking fears of a government takeover, AMA president David Allman called the Medicare proposal “the beginning of the end of the private practice of medicine.”69 In 1961, future president Ronald Reagan released a radio address warning listeners of “socialized medicine”; if they failed to urge their members of Congress to oppose Medicare, Reagan cautioned, the program would “pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.”70 In an attempt to get out ahead of Democrats’ future expansion of the Medicare program, congressional Republicans warned fellow legislators and the voting public of government overreach. Representative Thomas Bradford Curtis of Missouri worried that the bill was “just a foot in the door on which to further get the government in.” South Dakota’s Senator Karl Mundt called Medicare “another step toward destroying the independence and self-reliance in America which is the last best hope of individual freedom for all mankind.” Colorado’s Senator Gordon Allott described the bill as a “giant step” toward making “every citizen as dependent as possible on his Government for his every need.”71 Ultimately, Medicare did pass the House and the Senate as a “three layer cake” of coverage: hospital insurance for seniors, physicians’ insurance for seniors, and a new Medicaid program to supplement stateprovided health coverage for poor Americans.72 Despite their blustery rhetoric, nearly half of Republicans ultimately joined Democrats to vote in favor of the bill73 — a striking bipartisan achievement that political scientist Lawrence Brown argues was made possible by an unprecedented confluence of factors: a unified executive and Congress, a

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budget in surplus, an unenergetic Republican Party “still reeling from the shock of the Kennedy assassination” and, notably, a nation that had yet to be fully steeped in anti-government rhetoric.74 A growing group of conservatives, however, remained firmly opposed to this and other expansions of government power. Their poster child was Republican senator Barry Goldwater, who, in the spring of 1960, published a 123-page pamphlet called The Conscience of a Conservative that built upon the foundations laid by earlier libertarian thinkers. In the short manifesto, he argued that “man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the State. . . . If the Conservative is less anxious than his Liberal brethren to increase Social Security ‘benefits,’ it is because he is more anxious than his Liberal brethren that people be free throughout their lives to spend their earnings when and as they see fit.”75 Dismissed as a radical by more centrist Republicans,76 Goldwater took a vehemently anti-government stance, referring to government as “the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty” and calling for the election of public officials “who understand that their first duty . . . is to divest themselves of the power they have been given.” He envisioned the future election of a man “who will proclaim in a campaign speech: ‘I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.’”77 Goldwater’s pamphlet was a hit among the burgeoning right wing, quickly topping bestseller lists across the country.78 Pat Buchanan called it “the new testament” for conservatives, who “read it, memorized it, quoted it.”79 William F. Buckley said it held “near scriptural authority.”80 Communications scholar Michael J. Lee counts The Conscience of a Conservative among ten texts published between the end of World War II and 1964 that became “the de facto canon of conservatism.”81 A rising celebrity in conservative circles, Goldwater ultimately decided to run for president in the 1964 election, losing spectacularly to Lyndon Johnson in one of the most lopsided races in US history.82 However, just two years later, Republicans staged a comeback, gaining fortyseven seats in the House of Representatives.83 Conservatives attributed this reversal of fortunes, as well as Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, to Goldwater’s popularization of conservative principles, first in his pamphlet and then during his presidential run. The Heritage Foundation called Goldwater “the most consequential loser in American politics,” while the renowned conservative columnist George F. Will argued that 38

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Goldwater did, in fact, win the election for libertarian-minded conservatives; “it just took 16 years to count the votes.”84

The Reputation Crisis Solidifies With the 1970s came a series of events that portrayed government in a decidedly negative light. First, public sentiment turned against the Vietnam War. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that this shift occurred, researchers William Lunch and Peter Sperlich write that “popular uneasiness certainly began to set in by 1967.” By November of that year, “there were over half a million American troops in Vietnam and the U.S. government was spending more than a billion dollars a month for the war,” yet “no end to the war seemed in sight.” Antiwar sentiment began to grow, slowly at first, and then faster following the 1968 presidential campaign, when prominent political figures such as Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon made it possible for “Americans who considered themselves loyal and patriotic” to oppose the war and call for its end without appearing to side with farleft protesters. By September 1970, support for withdrawal had climbed to 55 percent. As political reporter Richard Rovere wrote at the time, “American opinion, as understood here, will tolerate intervention no longer.”85 Meanwhile, President Nixon’s Watergate scandal was putting the issue of government corruption front and center on the political stage. Public polling data from the decade reflect the emergence of corruption as a prominent political theme. Between 1970 and 1979, national public opinion polls asked an unprecedented forty-two questions about government corruption, up from just five questions during the 1960s. By 1978, fewer than half of Americans thought it was even possible to have a federal government “which is almost wholly free of corruption and pay- offs.” Only 10 percent believed that this described the federal government at the time.86 Michigan representative John Conyers warned during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment debate that “millions of citizens are genuinely afraid that they may have in office a person who might entertain the notion of taking over the government of this country.”87 The stagflation-induced recession of 1973–75, meanwhile, created an opportunity for Republicans to argue that not only was government corrupt, but it was incapable of efficiently managing the economy. In this formulation, it was no longer a question of whether govern39

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ment should take on additional responsibilities or leave them to the private sector. Now, government itself was the problem. “We wish to stress,” the 1976 Republican Party platform stated, “that the number one cause of inflation is the government’s expansion of the nation’s supply of money and credit needed to pay for deficit spending.  .  .  . When our government—through deficit spending and debasement of the currency— destroys the incentive to save and to invest, it destroys the very wellspring of American productivity.” In other words, government should leave the economy to the free market.88 This rhetoric was consequential. As Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker write in American Amnesia, “had there not been vigorous critics of the mixed economy at the ready, had they not wielded a coherent and powerful set of arguments, these economic troubles surely would not have precipitated such a fundamental reversal” in attitudes toward free-market capitalism. But critics abounded, even within Congress. In the authors’ analysis of phrases most commonly used in Congress in the 1950s and 1960s, they found that most were “nonpartisan and either unrelated to or favorable toward the mixed economy”—that is, an economy actively managed by government institutions. But by the 1970s, “phrases such as ‘free enterprise system’ and ‘lower tax brackets’ became prevalent, especially on the Republican side of the aisle.”89 Special interests accelerated the anti-government wave by launching covert public relations campaigns against Ralph Nader and a proposed new Consumer Protection Agency (CPA). The National Association of Manufacturers joined with the Grocery Manufacturers of America and other business groups to create “‘information pieces’ warning of the dire effects of a massive new ‘Naderite’ bureaucracy.” Meanwhile, the Business Roundtable “hired the North American Precis Syndicate to produce negative articles, ads, cartoons, and prepackaged editorials about the CPA that were distributed free to hundreds of small daily and weekly newspapers, which often published them verbatim without acknowledgment of the source.”90 When the bill to establish the CPA finally came to a vote, it suffered a resounding loss. An aide to Nader said that moderate Democrats had refused to support the bill not on its merits, but out of concern that it was “a move toward big government.”91 Jimmy Carter did little to fight against the right-turning tide. As president, Carter would champion fiscally conservative policies, touting the importance of balanced budgets and deregulation and largely embracing supply-side economics.92 By 1980, the stage was set for Ronald Reagan to run a presidential campaign against big government. 40

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Anti-government rhetoric was nothing new from Reagan. Since the early 1960s, he had been warning Americans of an inefficient federal bureaucracy with malicious intent: “If there was a distinctive thread in Reagan’s pre-presidential speeches,” writes Daniel Rodgers in Age of Fracture, “it was the way they turned the Cold War’s anxieties back on domestic politics—their displacement of the totalitarian nightmare from the world scene to the stealthy, creeping, insidious growth of government at home.”93 But Reagan’s presidency would help solidify this perspective in the halls of power. For Reagan, government was not only unhelpful; it was destructive. As he declared in a 1986 address, “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”94 By the time of Reagan’s election, Americans overwhelmingly shared his belief that government was “the problem.” By 1980, trust in government sat at just 26 percent. Three- quarters of Americans polled in 1981 said the phrase “efficient and well-run” did not describe the federal government, and only 21 percent believed that governmentprovided services were more efficient than those provided by private corporations.95 On November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in a landslide Electoral College victory: 489 votes to Carter’s paltry 49.96 In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan argued, “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” He went on to promise that “in the days ahead I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow, measured in inches and feet, not miles, but we will progress. It is time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles there will be no compromise.”97 Buoyed by his apparent electoral mandate, the new president promptly set to work fulfilling his campaign promises. “In the United States, the Reagan administration issued new marching orders, ‘Don’t just stand there; undo something.’”98 Yet, with the exception of reconciling a tax cut with a $35 billion reduction in government spending, Congress largely refused to pass Reagan’s small-government policy proposals, from cutting Social Security benefits to abolishing the Legal Services Corporation (which helps fund civil legal aid for poor Americans).99 By the end of his first term, “President Reagan had failed to 41

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translate his commitment to minimalist government into reality,” in part because his administration had “ignored the strength of coalitions of beneficiaries, service providers, activists, and members of Congress, all of whom had definite interests in the preservation and expansion of particular programs.”100 So Reagan changed tack. Rather than focus on cutting government programs completely, the president embraced the idea of privatizing them, arguing that selling government assets and services to the private sector would shrink government costs and take advantage of market efficiencies. In the starkest terms, he made clear that government was inferior to the private market: “The American people know that in many cases the Government is less efficient than private enterprise in providing certain services,” Reagan argued in 1987. “Government agencies do not have the same incentives and interests that allow the private market to provide goods and services more efficiently and effectively.”101 Shifting government-provided services to the private sector was seen as a political win-win. Reagan could cut government spending without eliminating popular services and benefits, thereby avoiding the public outrage that had previously scared Congress into inaction. “This is the beauty of privatization,” explained Stuart Butler, a Heritage Foundation analyst and former Reagan staffer. “Instead of having to say ‘no’ to constituencies, politicians can adopt a more palatable approach to cutting spending. They can reduce outlays by fostering private alternatives that are more attractive to voters, thereby reducing the clamor for government spending. Changing the political dynamics of government spending in this way is the secret of privatization.”102 Supporters of privatization presented it as a panacea for America’s ills. “Government created a hellish cycle of dependency,” read the 1984 Republican Party platform, while privatization “maximizes consumer freedom and choice  .  .  . reduces the size and cost of government  .  .  . stimulates the private sector, increases prosperity, and creates jobs.”103 Butler argued that the private sector could dramatically improve the output of inefficient government employees, and Reagan promised that privatization had “the potential for bringing enormous benefits to all members of society,” including pay raises, better services, and even global prosperity.104 Across the Atlantic Ocean, privatization also took off. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher sold more than $20 billion in state assets to the private sector.105 France and Italy similarly undertook vast privatization efforts, while neoliberal leaders at the World Bank required that 42

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developing countries embrace privatization in order to receive loans. A new economic ideology had taken hold across the globe, one featuring “faith in the wisdom and efficiency of markets, disdain for big government taxation, spending, and regulation, reverence for a globalized world of flexible labor pools, [and] free trade and free-floating capital.”106 The libertarian ideology benefited, too, from its utility as an “effective rhetorical strategy” to push back against the threat posed by the statist Soviet Union. In this sense, libertarianism “provided a useful ideological foil, not only to the totalitarian socialist projects of the time but also to more liberal efforts to expand the welfare states in the Western democracies. If you are not moving in the direction of Milton Friedman, the argument went, then you are moving in the direction of Leonid Brezhnev—it’s Chairman Greenspan or Chairman Mao.”107 Back at home, Democrats in Congress had also begun to move toward a more privatized vision for how government should operate. While liberals continued to believe that government should provide a robust safety net, they embraced the idea that the public sector and the private market could be mutually beneficial partners. “American prosperity has been most pronounced when the government played a supportive or catalytic role in the nation’s economic fortunes,” the 1984  Democratic Party platform read. “We are committed to pursuing industrial strategies that effectively and imaginatively blend the genius of the free market with vital government partnership and leadership.”108 When Democrats refused to support Reagan’s 1987 budget, which contained a then-unprecedented number of privatization recommendations, Fred Smith of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute urged the president to “identify Democratic senators and representatives who might be persuaded to support privatization and convince them to take the lead on the issue.”109 One such Democrat was Representative Dennis E. Eckart of Ohio, who believed his fellow party members had been too resistant to the idea of privatization. “Given the budget constraints we’re under, given the demands that people make on Government services, we ought to look at alternatives and better ways to provide them,” he told the New York Times in 1988. “The basic Democratic response until now has been ‘Drop dead’ but I think that’s a mistake.”110 As Reagan targeted Congressional Democrats, the conservative Olin Foundation began funding privatization- centered research at liberal think tanks and premier educational institutions. As the foundation’s executive director at the time explained, “We were 43

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interested in getting these ideas ensconced at liberal places.”111 And ensconced they became. By the time Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, politicians on both the left and the right had fully embraced the logic of privatization and its policy agenda. This is not hyperbole. In 1997, Ron Utt, the privatization czar for Ronald Reagan and a Heritage Foundation research fellow, wrote that Bill Clinton had promoted “the boldest privatization agenda put forth by any American president to date,” with proposals “virtually all drawn from recommendations made in 1988 by President Reagan’s Commission on Privatization.”112 Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform package alone, which permitted states to contract out certain aspects of welfare administration, was described by the Washington Post as “one of the largest transfers of public sector operations into private hands” in American history.113 To bring about a government that “works better and costs less,” as Vice President Al Gore put it, Clinton launched two initiatives: the National Performance Review and the National Commission on the State and Local Public Service, popularly called the “Winter Commission” after its chair, William Winter. Led by Gore and staffed by about 250 civil servants, the National Performance Review was tasked with identifying opportunities for improved efficiency within the federal government. Six months after its official launch, the National Performance Review  presented 2,000 pages’ worth of reports detailing 384 recommendations and “1,250 specific actions intended to save $108 billion, reduce the number of ‘overhead’ positions, and improve government operations.” By the end of 1993, Clinton had approved 16  directives “cutting the work force by 252,000 positions, cutting internal regulations in half, and requiring agencies to set customer service standards.”114 The Winter Commission, meanwhile, proposed recommendations for state and local government reform, especially within the civil service systems responsible for hiring, managing, and firing public employees. To that end, the commission’s June 1993 report “called for an ‘end to civil service paralysis’ by deregulating governments’ personnel systems.”115 According to one scholarly review, the Winter Commission report “devote[d] more pages to internal deregulation than any other single recommendation.”116 These admittedly dry government reports were accompanied by public relations stunts aimed at building support for the administration’s reform efforts. David Letterman welcomed Vice President Gore

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onto his late-night TV show, where Gore proceeded to “lampoon ashtray procurement in the Defense Department.” Top administration officials, meanwhile, “staged a media event outside the Office of Personnel Management in which they threw the 10,000-page Federal Personnel Manual into a dump truck.”117 The Democratic president also embraced the rhetoric of “government inefficiency,” frequently describing government as wasteful and ineffective in comparison to the private sector. In his 1993 State of the Union address, Clinton proposed paying for new government programs with “cuts in Government waste.” Further, he argued, “it is not enough simply to cut Government; we have to rethink the whole way it works.” Government operated in “outmoded ways that didn’t take maximum advantage of technology and didn’t do things that any business would have done years ago to save taxpayers’ money.” Calling for a renewed “spirit of innovation” in the public sector and a need to earn back the public’s trust, Clinton outlined a plan to reduce federal spending that would be achieved through, among other things, “cuts in government waste and [increased] efficiency.” Where government failed, industry thrived; as Clinton reminded Congress, “the real engine of economic growth in this country is the private sector.”118 The president’s focus on markets was a common refrain; indeed, one scholar found that Clinton spoke of markets and public-private partnerships “in nearly half (49.4 percent) of all his communications (i.e., in 2,136 of his 4,328 presentations).”119 His pro-market rhetoric also spread throughout his administration; Vice President Gore emphasized the importance of making “the federal government customer friendly,” while the National Performance Review promoted “an environment that commits federal managers to the same struggle to cut costs and improve customer service that compels private managers.”120 One might wonder how a Democratic president was able to promote a privatization agenda without facing enormous backlash from liberal voters. After all, research tells us that the groups most likely to oppose privatization include “public sector workers, women . . . and those who consider business and industry to be too powerful”121—that is, groups that tend to vote Democratic. The political trust literature offers some insight. Liberals are more likely to support privatization when they trust government and, as Marc Hetherington fi nds, liberals tend to trust government when Democrats are in office.122 In other words, the fact that Bill Clinton was a Democrat helped him convince liberal voters to embrace (or at least not oppose) his privatization agenda.

45

CHAPTER 2

Conclusion It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the negative reputation of government became a nearly inseparable part of American political life. By the 1980s, however, the reputation crisis had clearly begun. Democrats felt the “political winds” shifting and “sought to prove they were not too liberal” by coalescing around a New Democratic neoliberalism.123 By the time Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, politicians on both the left and the right had fully embraced the logic of privatization and its policy agenda. From welfare reform and NAFTA to “three strikes” and the Crime Bill, the Democratic president’s agenda was designed to “triangulate” between the left and the neoliberal right. There was even talk in the White House of partially privatizing Social Security. In a 1997 survey conducted by Clinton’s pollsters, designed to take the temperature of the nation on the issue, fully 73 percent of Democratic voters favored such a move.124 As one observer surmises: in “a reluctant bow to Ronald Reagan, [Clinton] dedicated himself to keeping the bond market happy and declared that ‘the era of big government is over.’”125 The growth of contracting and public-private partnerships has likewise been a bipartisan project— both in Washington and at lower levels of government. President Clinton, for instance, privatized the conversion of military-grade uranium, turned over responsibility for some of the CIA’s research and development to a venture capital firm, and brought in a private security firm to conduct government background checks. Democrat Douglas Wilder, as governor of Virginia, promoted privatizing toll roads. Democrat Ed Rendell, who served as governor of Pennsylvania, mayor of Philadelphia, and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was a stalwart champion for privatization. Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago infamously advised his successor to “privatize everything you can.”126 By all available measures, the push toward partial privatization has been embraced by both parties and is “no longer a fad.”127 The brief history I have outlined here lays the groundwork for the discussion that occupies the central focus of this book. Following on this elite rhetoric, Americans as a whole came to express deep skepticism of the idea that government is capable of successful intervention into the problems of the day. As I will detail in the next chapter, even many Americans who might be philosophically prone to support big government express practical concerns about whether it will ultimately fail to deliver. The result is a modern politics in which citizens’ 46

A B R I E F H I S TO R Y O F P U B L I C R E P U TAT I O N

attitudes toward large and small government are not purely ideological, at least not in the traditional sense. That is, many Americans do not prefer privatization only because they believe government shouldn’t play a substantial role. Rather, they support privatization because they have come to believe government can’t play its role effectively and efficiently. In the remaining chapters, I turn to the implications of this belief for American political life.

47

THREE

“Good Enough for Government Work” Over the last several decades, the American National Election Study has repeatedly asked Americans about their attitudes toward the scope and priorities of government: “Some people think the government should provide fewer services, even in areas such as health and education, in order to reduce spending. Other people feel that it is important for the government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending. Where would you place yourself on this scale, or haven’t you thought much about this?” As figure 3.1 shows, there is a significant gap between Democrats and Republicans on this question, and differences have remained relatively stable over time. That there are differences between Democrats and Republicans is not surprising. After all, a primary ideological distinction between the major political parties in America today is their views on the optimal balance between government and the private market. Compared to Democrats, Republicans are consistently less likely to support the expansion of public services and additional spending, and they are more likely to say that government should downsize its activities and expenditures. Indeed, as one political pundit concludes, Republicans and Democrats “have existentially different views of the world” when it comes to how big American government should be.1 In this chapter, however, I differentiate between what Americans believe about government’s proper scope and priorities and what they believe about the competence of 48

“GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK”

F I G U R E 3 .1 Democrats are more likely than Republicans to prefer more services rather than less spending. Source: American National Election Studies, 1982–2012.

government, and I explore what this distinction means for the range of problems Americans want government to address. In this chapter, I ask: What do citizens believe about the ability of American government to deliver high- quality services at a reasonable price? And how do perceptions of government competence affect citizens’ preferences regarding public versus private-sector service provision? Using a wide range of data, I show that when it comes to perceptions of government, Americans on both sides of the aisle express profound frustration with government spending and performance. Specifically, while partisans are ideologically divided over the size of government, there is far more consensus on the current state of government disarray. Democrats and Republicans alike view American government as egregiously ineffective and inexcusably profligate. These views are not only prevalent; they are also important in shaping people’s political preferences. Across a range of services, I fi nd that people who express confidence in the efficiency and effectiveness of government are less likely to support turning programs and services over to the private market. This relationship holds even once we account for differences in support for privatization that are rooted in political partisanship and ideology. As I discuss, this distinction between philosophical preferences for smaller government, on the one hand, and practical concerns about government performance, on the other, has important implications for understanding what Americans really want from their government. 49

CHAPTER 3

Public Waste and Inefficiency: A Widespread and Salient Concern Americans are deeply concerned about wasteful government spending. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2012, only 38 percent of Americans described their state government as generally efficient; just 24 percent said the same about the federal government. In the same survey, just a third of Americans agreed that their state government is careful in how it spends the people’s money, and only about half that many (17 percent) said the same about the federal government.2 In another survey, a minuscule 4 percent of Americans said they thought government did not waste very much money.3 Other surveys find similarly dire assessments. In a 2010 study by the Center for American Progress (CAP), only 7 percent of Americans rated the government as being either excellent or good at “spending money efficiently”; nearly half (45 percent) of the public gave government poor marks on this score.4 In the same survey, respondents were asked directly whether they believed government programs and agencies are wasteful in their spending. On this question, fully 94 percent responded that government wastes either “a lot” (66 percent) or at least “some” (28 percent) of the money citizens pay in taxes. When probed about what they personally mean by wasteful spending, the most frequently cited examples were “government programs continuing for years even though they have not proven effective” and “government contractors receiving no-bid contracts and overcharging for services.” Unfortunately, detailed data on perceptions of government spending and waste do not go back to the 1930s, or even as far back as the 1960s and ’70s when the neoliberal ethos began to take hold in American political life. This makes it impossible to know exactly when concerns about government efficiency began to arise. What we do know is that citizens have consistently expressed negative views of government over the last few decades. Figure 3.2 shows data from a series of surveys conducted from 1987 to 2009. Each year or so, a representative sample of Americans was asked whether they believe that “when something is run by government, it is usually wasteful and inefficient.” At no time in the two decades of surveys did the proportion of the public expressing concern about government performance dip below about half; in most years, it was closer to two-thirds. What is most striking is that, in many years, Republicans and Democrats have expressed comparable levels of skepticism about government efficiency. The largest differences between partisans have ap50

“GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK”

peared when Democrats held control of both the Congress and the presidency—first in the mid-1990s, and then again in the years immediately following Barack Obama’s 2008 election. During these times, Republicans became more convinced that government was wasteful and inefficient, while Democratic attitudes about government performance became somewhat more positive. In contrast, during times of Republican control, Democrats’ concerns about government inefficiency and waste matched those of Republicans, and so the partisan gap attenuated. In fact, partisan perceptions of government look nearly identical in the late 1980s, with Reagan in office; during this period, the partisan gap closed to less than a percentage point. The attitudes of political independents are somewhat more stable over time, generally tracking those of Republicans but moderated somewhat during the high point of the 1990s.5 Attitudes by political ideology trend quite similarly to partisanship, such that liberals and moderates in 2003 held similar views on the question of government efficiency: about 55 percent of each group voiced concern that government was wasteful. Conservatives in that year were only about 10 percentage points more likely to agree that this was the case. By 2009 the ideological divide had widened somewhat, like the partisan divide, as liberals became more optimistic about government efficiency and conservatives became more pessimistic. Like

F I G U R E 3 . 2 Many Americans of both parties agree that “when something is run by government, it is usually wasteful and inefficient.” Source: Pew Research Center, Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes, 1987–2012.

51

CHAPTER 3

independents, moderates’ views are somewhat more stable and appear less sensitive to which political party holds power in Washington. Perceptions of government efficiency also vary somewhat across other demographic groups (see table 3.1). Those with higher incomes are more likely to express concern about waste and inefficiency, and whites are substantially more likely than black and Hispanic Americans to agree that government is wasteful. Most notably, a larger proportion of older Americans express concern about government efficiency; 63 percent and 69 percent of baby boomers and senior citizens voiced this concern.6 By 2012, however, about half (47 percent) of those in the millennial generation and 59 percent of Gen Xers also agreed that “when something is run by government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful,” up significantly from 2007. Citizens also have limited confidence that American government is effective at achieving its goals; for instance, a survey by Pew Research finds that only a minority of Americans think government is doing either an excellent or good job at “running its programs.” Nor are Table 3.1 Across demographic groups, substantial proportions of Americans agree that government is wasteful and inefficient. % agree Partisanship

Republican Independent Democrat

77 63 41

Gender

Women Men

53 66

Age

18–29 30– 49 50– 64 65+

47 59 63 69

Race

White (non- Hispanic) Black (non- Hispanic) Hispanic

65 39 49

Education

Less than HS HS or GED Some college College grad

63.7 57.8 57.6 60.7

Income

Low Lower middle Upper middle Upper

48.1 57.0 59.8 66.6

Total

59.0

Source: Pew Research Center Trends in American Values, 2009 for education and income and 2012 for other covariates.

52

“GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK”

worries about public competence confined to a single policy domain. Rather, citizens believe government is at best mediocre in its performance across a host of domains, from conserving natural resources to reducing juvenile delinquency.7 Again, similarly pessimistic views emerge in other surveys. In the CAP survey, Americans were asked how they would rate the competence of government programs and agencies in “accomplishing their goals” and “providing high quality services.” Positive evaluations were provided by just 21 percent and 16 percent of Americans, respectively. Even worse assessments were provided on questions related to government management. Just 14 percent of Americans held the view that government was “well run and effectively managed,” while more than half described the management of government as either not so good or poor.8 Democrats appear much more positive than Republicans about the ability of government to manage its programs. However, even Democrats are not overly confident on this measure. When asked to rate government on being well run and effectively managed, only a minority of Democrats choose either excellent or good (23 percent); most Democrats give the more neutral rating of fair (42 percent). Finally, the data make clear that concerns about government inefficiency and poor management are not only widespread among Americans; they are also highly salient. In 2010, a representative sample of Americans was asked about a series of specific concerns they might have regarding government. Two of the potential responses had to do with the scope of government, such as government “is too big and powerful” or “interferes too much in peoples’ lives.” Two were concerned with government priorities: that government “does too little for average Americans” and its “policies unfairly benefit some groups.” A final option was that government is wasteful and inefficient. On each item, respondents were asked whether they thought this was a “major problem,” a “minor problem,” or “not a problem” at all. In response to the item regarding government waste and inefficiency, fully 70 percent of adults concurred that this is a major problem, the highest proportion out of any of the issues queried (see figure 3.3). Only 7 percent of Americans felt that government waste was not a problem.9 A majority of each partisan group identified waste and inefficiency as a major problem, although a larger proportion of Republicans (81 percent) than either independents (76 percent) or Democrats (58  percent) did so. In fact, Republicans identified waste as a bigger problem than any other issue on the list—including that government is too big and powerful. For Democrats, concern about waste and ineffi53

CHAPTER 3

Government waste and inefficiency is seen as a “major problem” by members of both political parties. Source: Pew Research Center, The People and Their Government, 2010.

FIGURE 3.3

ciency was only slightly surpassed by concern that government “does too little for average Americans” (63 percent). Moreover, most Americans fault government itself, rather than placing blame on the increasingly complex set of issues the political system is asked to address. I find evidence of this in a survey I conducted as part of the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). The CCES collects data on a national sample of Americans, stratified by state and district. In the survey, I asked a subsample of roughly a thousand Americans to evaluate government performance across six specific domains.10 Two of these domains were related to the social safety net: “providing a decent standard of living for the elderly” and “providing service to the mentally ill.” Two were related to basic security functions: “delivering police protection and law enforcement” and “operating prisons.” The last two were related to fundamental infrastructure: “doing sanitation and garbage collection” and “building and maintaining highways and roads.” As in other surveys, respondents find government lacking on nearly all fronts (see table 3.2). This is particularly true on social service tasks; more than two-thirds give government only poor or fair marks (as opposed to either good or excellent) for performance in this domain. Other areas of performance evaluation were somewhat more variable. While about two-thirds of Americans believe government does only a poor or fair job operating prisons, about two-thirds give a positive evaluation when it comes to the performance of police. Individuals also 54

“GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK”

give government higher marks for its performance on sanitation and garbage collection than on highway and street repair. Again, these attitudes are similar across party lines. On questions related to the social safety net, large majorities of all partisan groups believe government performance is inadequate. On care of the elderly, Republicans are only somewhat more likely than Democrats to rate government negatively, and people from both parties are equally likely

Table 3.2 The poor performance of the public sector is largely blamed on government itself, rather than the complexity of issues.

Performance evaluation

Explanation for poor or fair performance

Both

Issue too complex

Providing a decent standard of living for the elderly Republicans 70.8 48.7 Independents 69.6 38.2 Democrats 63.1 31.4 Total 68.3 38.8*

41.6 50.6 54.1 49.2

9.7 11.2 14.4 12.0

Providing services to the mentally ill Republicans 72.6 Independents 77.0 Democrats 75.6 Total 75.5

56.5 54.1 58.4 56.5

13.0 16.6 21.0 17.5

Delivering police protection and law enforcement Republicans 38.1 44.0 Independents 40.1 42.1 Democrats 36.2 23.2 Total 38.6 35.8***

47.3 47.7 52.7 49.4

8.8 10.3 24.1 14.8

Operating prisons Republicans Independents Democrats Total

46.1 40.0 36.3 40.4***

48.9 53.1 46.2 49.4

5.0 6.9 17.6 10.2

Doing sanitation and garbage collection Republicans 29.1 Independents 28.4 Democrats 21.8 Total 27.4

46.0 40.6 33.3 39.4*

50.0 51.6 45.5 48.9

4.0 7.8 21.2 11.7

Building and maintaining highways and streets Republicans 59.3 Independents 62.9 Democrats 54.9 Total 59.4

58.3 56.5 48.5 54.1

36.4 36.5 40.2 37.8

5.3 7.1 11.2 8.1

Poor or fair (%)

Government at fault

66.8 69.4 63.7 66.7

30.5 29.3 20.5 26.0#

Source: 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. N = 348 Democrats, 291 independents, 248 Republicans. # p