Abstract
How did public trust in key actors in the U.S. response to COVID-19 vary and evolve over the course of 2020? Despite this targeted research question, the book, Trust in Government Agencies in the Time of COVID-19 by Scott E. Robinson, Kuhika Gupta, Joseph Ripberger, Jennifer A. Ross, Andrew Fox, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Carol Silva, investigates important questions about why certain government organizations are considered to be more trustworthy than others by certain members of the public. Specifically, it offers real-time insights into the COVID-19 pandemic and generally, demonstrates that trust in agencies and who trusts those agencies varies. While the implications for public health are clear, this work also contains important practical and scholarly insights for those interested in public administration, public management, public policy, science communication, public opinion, political identity, and disaster relief. The book is published as an open access publication in the Cambridge Elements series in Public and Nonprofit Administration (eds. Andrew Whitford and Robert Christensen).
The book focuses on trust in local, state, and federal U.S. agencies during the early onset of COVID-19 (March 2020), as well as how trust in these institutions changed over time by employing survey data collected over the course of 2020. The book has six “chapters” and reads like a long-form research paper (79 pages total). Chapter 1 sets important context for the theoretical arguments, data, and broader context of the argument by describing the chaotic information environment of the COVID-19 pandemic and the history of trust in U.S. government from the 1950s until present day. Notably, this chapter addresses how we tend to simplify our understanding of trust in government by collapsing government to a broad entity and the individuals who trust in government to a singular average. This approach coarsens our understanding of which parts of government people trust and who is more or less likely to trust these various parts of government. This insight is a key contribution of this manuscript and a theme that the authors return to throughout.
In general, the book approaches trust as a link between attitudes and actions. Chapter 2 builds on a basic model of trust, defined as a relationship between two parties connected via expectations over a specific action. After reviewing theories of social trust, with a special focus on theories of trust in political institutions that ranges from Hobbes to Hetherington, the authors conclude that our understanding of political trust is largely based on “general” public impressions of the “general” performance of a large, monolithic U.S. government. They also note that our current understanding of trust in political institutions largely fails to link trust to an action. Building on these observations, the authors argue that trust varies across various components of government, and this variation is largely determined by the task/responsibilities of said agencies. From here, the book focuses on organizations involved in sharing information with the public during the COVID-19 crisis at the local (local hospitals and local physicians), state (state health departments and governors), and federal (Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)) levels. It proposes four hypotheses, two of which examine how agency characteristics (position within the federalist system, expertise) affect trust in agencies, and two of which examine how respondent characteristics (partisanship, age) affect the trust in agencies expressed by individuals.
The study isolates specific agencies and their tasks through careful case selection and survey design. Specifically, the book examines agencies that served as key information providers during the COVID-19 pandemic and employs nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional survey data collected on a weekly basis from March 2020 to November 2020. To measure trust, the survey asks respondents to “indicate the level of trust you have in experts on public health issues” (pg 27). Chapter 3 details the data collection efforts; the authors should be commended for anticipating the severity of the pandemic early on, and for proactively designing and implementing a survey that documents and sheds light on an important period of modern history.
Chapter 4 creates a baseline of trust in agencies using survey responses collected in March 2020, and Chapter 5 investigates how trust varied over the course of 2020. The discussion is largely descriptive: findings are discussed in terms of average and distribution of survey responses, though there is some modeling. Readers will likely remember discussions on trust in government that took place during 2020; the author team does a good job of reminding readers of this context, while also lending new insight through their findings. For example, the surveys reveal some surprising insights about which agencies are viewed as trustworthy and who among the public trusts them. First, though federal agencies were expected to be viewed as less trustworthy than state and local agencies, survey respondents expressed similarly high levels of trust in federal (CDC and HHS) and local (hospitals, physicians) agencies in March 2020. At the state level, state health departments were more trusted than governors in March 2020. The authors attribute these overall patterns to the connection between trust and actions, specifically the role that expertise plays in building trust. Trust in local agencies was relatively robust over the course of 2020, while trust in federal and state agencies both fell. However, trust in federal agencies seemingly stabilized, while trust in state agencies continued to decrease throughout 2020. Here again, the authors propose that the difference is due to expertise: the federal agencies in the study are more specialized, while the state agencies are more generalist. Second, the results suggest that Republicans and Democrats expressed relatively similar levels of trust in agencies as of March 2020. Rather, political independents (those without a party identification) expressed much lower levels of trust in agencies (even those at the local level) than party identifiers. While Republicans became less trusting over the course of 2020, the survey findings largely indicate that this decline was not as severe as the media portrayed it to be. By far, the least trusting group are those that do not identify with a major political party.
As a reader, I am left with a few key takeaways and questions, which I think is the mark of interesting scholarly work. I pose a few of them here to continue the conservation that the authors undertake in the manuscript. First, the book clearly demonstrates that trust in agencies varies. In particular, the work carefully considers how trust is conceptualized and measured. In this instance, the book operationalizes trust in terms of expertise. Future work should consider how operationalizing trust in a more specific way ties to other concepts, such as organizational reputation. Work in public administration has found that the reputation of bureaucratic agencies varies (e.g., Teodoro and An 2018; Lee and Van Ryzin 2020). While the author team notes that they are unable to make causal claims, disentangling how trust, expertise and reputation fit together seems like an important part of understanding how trust relates to expected actions and outcomes. Second, trust among the public varies. In particular, this study contributes to how trust varies among partisans and non-partisans and age cohorts. I’m curious whether these same patterns of distrust extend to other areas of government action: whether “who” trusts government changes based on the specific policy area or service being provided. In our own work, we’ve explored how race and ethnicity influence trust in government provision of drinking water, and that experiencing tap water problems can reduce a Democrat's trust in government to the level of a Republican's trust (Teodoro, Zuhlke and Switzer 2022). Third, trust in agencies, and who trusts those agencies, can change quickly. Whether the dynamics of change explored here would happen as quickly for a problem other than COVID-19 is unclear, though the authors make a good case for measuring trust on a granular timescale. The public discourse on COVID-19 has been riddled with discussions about lost trust in government, and this work offers interesting insight into that discussion. An optimistic implication of this work is that trust in government can improve just as quickly through strategic framing of agencies and public problems.
Not to be understated is the effort this work undertakes to expand our understanding of trust in government from a broad, simplified government to trust in specific agencies within the government, especially at various levels of government. Though the book practically suggests that agencies viewed as more trustworthy may be more successful in encouraging folks to adopt certain public health protective measures, the book stops short of investigating the consequences of distrust in agencies for policy implementation. This differs from a recent paper from the author team (Robinson et al. 2021), which ostensibly uses the same data to examine how trust in agencies relates to support and adherence to COVID-19 policies. Regardless, the practical implications of this book make it an easy fit with graduate programs training future practitioners, and the largely descriptive methodology means the book could fit well within upper-level undergraduate courses in public health, public administration, and public management, to name a few. I could also see this book generating very interesting discussions within a graduate-level survey methodology course. Notably, this book is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. For those who cannot dedicate a whole book to this topic within their courses, they might opt for the Robinson et al. (2021) paper instead, as both offer interesting insights into trust in government.
