Trust in government, and opportunities to rebuild it

This article is the second in a two-part series about trust in state and local government. You can find the first article here. The Route Fifty staff will be exploring this issue throughout 2024. You will be able to find coverage on it here.

"Trust in government is crucial in supporting a society where families and individuals can thrive,” says Justin Brown, former Oklahoma secretary of human services. “It lays the groundwork for effective policies that drive economic success and personal well-being.”

But that trust has been waning at the state and local level in recent years. As previously reported, about 45% of Americans have a less than favorable view of the trustworthiness of local governments. That’s somewhat up from 40% in 2017.

So, what can public leaders do to help give it a boost? It turns out there are several opportunities for states, cities and counties to increase the confidence of residents.

One way is transparency—publicly sharing the work public servants are doing and the results of that work. As Marc Holzer, a well-known academic and author of Rethinking Public Administration, says, “We have a lot of data out there and a lot of performance measures. But most citizens don’t have access to that because it’s not communicated to them. And in many cases, it’s deliberately hidden by management because they don’t want to put themselves in the line of fire.”

That’s a big mistake. People mistrust what they don’t understand. They’re more inclined to have faith in an institution that is candid, even if it’s open about mistakes or “performance is proven to be poor,” says Michael Pagano, dean emeritus of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “If voters trust that the government is providing accurate information, they will continue to trust.”

Most of the research done into trust in government makes the point that counties, cities and towns, tend to be the most-trusted levels of government because residents feel closer to the seats of power. But increasingly, as security has become a significant issue, it’s nearly impossible to find a phone number, an email address or even a name of the individual in charge of delivering a particular service. As we recently wrote, “You’d think that this would be basic information provided on a government’s website, but often it’s not.”

Making matters worse in many cities is the fact that increasingly people aren’t dealing directly with employees who work for their local governments when they get fishing and hunting licenses, pay property taxes, pay for traffic tickets and so on. The loss of direct contact with government employees can’t help but alter the government-resident relationship and put more weight on the ease with which residents relate to their cities electronically. “A good online experience correlates positively with trust in government,” according to John O’Leary, state and local government research leader at Deloitte.

For this two-part series about trust in government, the engagement and analytics company Polco assembled for Route Fifty an exclusive list of cities that had better levels of trust than expected after considering several community socioeconomic factors, such as income, education, age, ethnicity and population size.

One of those cities is Apache Junction, Arizona, home to about 40,000 people. Matt Busby, assistant city manager, attributes part of Apache Junction’s success in this arena to the fact that “you can go to our website and find contact information for every council member, and people can reach out to them. One of our council members even has her name and phone number on the side of her truck.”

Another way that local governments can earn their residents’ confidence is engagement—making it easy for them to feel like their voices are being heard and they’re involved in the priorities their town or city sets.

Avondale, Arizona, is a city of 92,000 people, which borders Phoenix. According to Cherlene Penilla, assistant city manager, “We’ve done citizen surveys in Avondale for about 15 years now, and the confidence in our government has increased significantly between 2018 and 2023. That’s largely because we have included our citizens in the process of decision-making. One good example is that the city has responded to a desire on the part of our residents for quality recreational infrastructure. We’re now completing work on a $28 million aquatic center that will include an Olympic sized pool with 10 lanes and another pool with a lazy river and all kinds of play features for kids.”

North Mankato, Minnesota, has benefitted by restoring a means for citizen input that had been waylaid for a while. “For years, citizens liked being able to talk in city council meetings in front of the camera for our local cable access channel,” says Kevin McCann, city administrator. “We used to have two opportunities, one at the beginning and one at the end. And then the previous administration changed it so that the one at the beginning of the meeting was canceled and the one after the meeting was just a forum, but it wasn’t being televised. And that held people back from participating or they would just become louder and louder.”

Shortly after taking over in 2022, McCann and the city council brought the original format back. “It’s now back to two sessions again. As a result, we were able to establish greater trust in the government because people felt that we were listening to them.”

But Will Hatcher, chair of the department of social sciences at Augusta University, cautions that relying exclusively on public meetings may not engender universal trust. “It may be difficult for people in lower income groups to participate,” he says, “and that may make them less likely to trust in government. There’s a frustration in not being involved. When you expand public participation but don’t get it to as many people as possible, you’re empowering the people who already have power and potentially losing confidence from the rest.”

Skillful use of social media appears to help, as well. According to Polco data, the percentage of Marion, Iowa, residents who have overall confidence in the city’s government has risen from an impressive 61% in 2019 to a remarkable 71% in 2023. “We’re very engaged in social media,” says Mayor Nick AbouAssaly. “That’s where people are expressing their concerns. And we can explain the city’s perspective on social media as well. When I respond I always end with an invitation to talk with that person about their needs. That builds more credibility and respect.”

Of course, Marion only has a population of about 43,000, so the offer of personal meetings can’t reasonably be extended to cities or counties that are significantly larger, or to states altogether. Still, the lesson learned is that in order to build trust, you have to meet people where they are, even when it’s on Facebook, X, Reddit or TikTok.

While trust in states and localities continues to look good compared with the federal government, it’s becoming clear to close observers that they are inextricably linked. And with a hyperpartisan Congress and an election year in which politicians are accusing one another of a variety of failings and misdeeds, the lack of confidence in the feds begets a similar problem in the other levels of government.

This is partially true because to many Americans government is government, and they have little notion of what each level is responsible for.

“Many residents, even many of my best friends, struggle to differentiate the levels of government,” says Michelle Kobayashi, principal research analyst at Polco and its think tank, the National Research Center. “So, they often are put into the same bag in terms of opinions and trust. Local governments need to figure out ways to differentiate themselves from the federal government.”

At the peak of the pandemic, the level of confidence in local government actually rose. Kobayashi speculates that this was because people were aware that the services available to combat Covid were coming to them largely through their counties, and that local governments were managing the pandemic in different and often more effective ways. The National Research Center and the Government Performance Action and Learning data consortia, which the center helped found, discovered that at the height of the pandemic overall trust in local government had risen to 57%, before subsequently dropping to 48%.

Clearly a pandemic is hardly the ideal way to foster trust in government. But it’s likely that the single best way for governments to earn confidence is by delivering services efficiently and well. Standing in seemingly endless lines in Departments of Motor Vehicles doesn’t engender trust. Quick responses to a report of a pothole does. And while it’s impossible to deliver all the promised services to all the people all the time, the closer governments can get to accomplishing that, the better chance they’ll have to be trusted to the extent that they deserve to be.