"Trust Deficit Disorder": The Role of Social or Economic Grievances on Institutional Trust During Covid-19 in the United States

Abstract

Trust in institutions across Western countries has been on the decline for some time now. World events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, had an impact on trust. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (2018) titled this decline across countries a "Trust Deficit Disorder". A great deal of scholarship has contributed to ideas on why trust is important to a state. On the other hand, there is less understanding of how trust declines and what factors contribute to the decline. The Covid-19 pandemic, and the social restrictions and economic decline that followed, had a great impact on trust in American institutions. This thesis examines both the grievance hypothesis and the macro-institutional hypothesis as it relates to the decline of trust in American institutions, specifically the White House, Congress, state government, and city government, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Utilizing Collier and Hoeffler's (2000) grievances, I approach the perceptions of social restrictions and economic decline from the Covid-19 pandemic as grievances. Additionally, following the framework of Hardin (1993), trust is defined as "a three-part relation: A trusts B to do X" (pg. 506). By employing concepts by Collier and Hoeffler (2000) and Hardin (1993) and drawing from the framework of Mishler and Rose (2001), this thesis seeks to understand if there is a relationship between economic or social grievances and institutional trust. Three hypotheses are being tested including Hypothesis 1: States with stricter Covid-19 measures will have lower trust in institutions than states with less strict Covid-19 measures, Hypothesis 2: States with a greater negative change in employment rate will have lower trust in institutions than states with greater positive change in employment rate, and Hypothesis 3: States with a greater positive change in quarterly GDP will have lower trust in institutions than states with no change in quarterly GDP. To test the hypotheses, in a state-level analysis, this thesis uses a regression-based approach with survey data collected from the Covid States Project alongside social and economic data from other official sources.

Overall, there is little evidence to support the hypotheses that economic or social grievances affect trust in various institutions. Although the relationship between no trust in the White House and Covid-19 policies is shown to be statistically significant, the models show a negative relationship. Therefore, when states have more Covid-19 policies there is a decline in survey respondents who do not trust the state government. There is some evidence to support that different institutions react differently to each grievance. Future research should consider the impact of social identities, the definition of trust by survey respondents, the differences in trust in various institutions, and the suitability of an analysis at the individual level.