A version of this article by Denia Garcia was originally published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Ideas Lab as part of the Main Street Agenda.
It can be dizzying to keep track of everything taking place amid the election chaos. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been zigzagging across the country making a variety of claims, demands, and pleas. Despite the uniqueness of this election, when you really boil it down, the candidates are saying the same thing politicians have always said to the public: trust me.
The problem is that the trust they ask of the public is increasingly harder to come by. In an April 2024 Pew Survey, 22% of Americans said they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” This number has hovered around 1 in 5 for at least the past decade. It’s hard to believe that 77% felt this way sixty years ago.
Gallup has similarly tracked declining trust in institutions. Their 2023 survey found that most of the institutions they asked about were at or near all-time lows in terms of Americans having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. The police, public schools, large technology companies, and big business all matched their all-time lows.
Dinner conversations reveal skepticism
The low trust in public schools was clear in the Main Street Agenda Community Conversations we have been holding at the La Follette School of Public Affairs to foster civic dialogue among Wisconsinites. A colleague shared with me how, once the issue of schools increasingly relying on referenda came up at the table he was facilitating, distrust quickly reared its head.
Over dinner, several participants questioned how school districts are spending the money they’re asking of taxpayers through the referenda and grumbled at a perceived lack of transparency around the usage of the funds.
Rogers Park participatory budgeting
My colleague shared this anecdote with me because he knew that this question of institutional trust animates much of my research. Recently, I published a multiyear ethnographic study of participatory budgeting in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.
Participatory budgeting is a practice in which citizens make decisions about part of a public budget through a series of assemblies, deliberations, and voting methods. The 49th Ward in Chicago, where I conducted my fieldwork, became the first place in the United States to implement a participatory budget in 2009.
My fieldwork included helping the alderman’s office recruit participatory budgeting voters by asking residents walking by a train station, “Would you like to decide how to spend a million dollars to improve the neighborhood?” To anyone who stopped, I explained that participatory budgeting gave residents, even non-citizens and minors, decision-making power over one million dollars of the alderman’s discretionary funds. Based on public meetings and research, community volunteers identified projects to improve the neighborhood’s infrastructure. These could include repaving streets, painting murals, and installing new playgrounds. Passersby could vote on the spot on these projects, and the winning projects had to be implemented.
Even in the highly diverse and politically active community of Rogers Park, a major theme that emerged in my observations was pervasive distrust in the government. Passerby after passerby questioned if the government could be an honest and effective broker of the public’s funds.
The compounding effects of marginalization
Not surprisingly, there was often a racial element to this lack of trust that revealed a deeply broken relationship between citizens and their government. The belief that projects on the ballot would not be completed or that the funds would not be distributed fairly was more prevalent among Latino and Black residents. One man said to me in Spanish, “Why [vote] if you are not going to do it?” as he walked away. A Black woman told me, “It’s not going to be for this part of the neighborhood.”
Considering historical and contemporary marginalization, political exclusion and disinvestment in their neighborhoods, it’s easy to see why they might feel this way. People of color, immigrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and other victims of oppression have long been accustomed to the government not fulfilling its promises.
Distrust in Wisconsin
This is not just a Chicago story. 85% of Americans believe that elected officials do not care what people like them think. And in fact, White Americans are less trustful of the government than Black, Hispanic, or Asian Americans. Only 19% of White Americans trust the government to do what is right just about always or most of the time.
Here in Wisconsin, the trend of White, rural communities losing trust in institutions and feeling left behind is explored in depth in Kathy Cramer’s seminal book, The Politics of Resentment.
It’s easy to see why trust is so low across the board here when you consider that Wisconsinites have many issues that trouble them. In the WisconSays/La Follette survey we have been using for the Main Street Agenda, more than two in three Wisconsinites identified gun violence, inflation, crime, health care, and income and wealth distribution as significant problems in the country.
Rebuilding trust
So how do we rebuild trust in institutions after a half century of breaking them down? There are no easy answers, but thankfully many people are turning their attention to this matter. While participatory budgeting and the street outreach I practiced during my fieldwork are far from perfect, they are examples of efforts to bring everyday citizens closer to the decision-making process.
The good news is that, despite their skepticism, people do participate in civic activities. And participatory budgeting is growing in popularity, with Boston the latest high-profile city to adopt it.
Along with sustained and meaningful engagement, others have suggested increased transparency, improved public services, and even better customer support to rebuild trust and help citizens feel connected to an often inscrutable system.
Beyond these ongoing efforts to turn the tide, I see hope in our youth. As an educator, I often encounter students who want to build toward an inclusive, people-centered approach to government.
Undoing half a century of deliberately eroding institutional trust will take time. Our youth appear ready for the challenge, but they can’t and shouldn’t bear this burden alone. If they feel like elected officials are not helping build a better future alongside them, they may, like generations before them, become disillusioned. This would be disastrous for American democracy. Trust me.
What matters to Wisconsin
The La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are collaborating to share insights on how Wisconsinites feel about important policy topics through a yearlong project called the Main Street Agenda. Each month, the La Follette School and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will feature a different policy topic, analyzing new statewide survey data to highlight what matters to Wisconsin. The WisconSays/La Follette Survey being used for the Main Street Agenda is a subset of the new WisconSays opinion panel based out of the UW-Madison Survey Center. There are more than 3,500 Wisconsinites enrolled in this representative panel.